Was the Supreme Court ever what we thought it was?

Public trust in the Supreme Court is near a three-decade low, according to Pew Research Center: only 45% of Americans currently view the Court favorably, down 20 points from 2021, with Republicans and Democrats now divided by 44 percentage points in how they see it.

Most Americans, across party lines, still say justices shouldn’t let politics shape their rulings, and most also believe, increasingly, that they do. But is that a new failure, or a return to an older reality we’ve simply forgotten? Was there ever a Court that stood apart from politics, or did we just get better, for a while, at believing in one?

Rachel A. Shelden, author of The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History, has spent her career studying how the Court actually operated in its first century, long before the modern ideal of judicial neutrality took hold. Peter S. Canellos, author of Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, has spent his time tracing how one justice’s life story became constitutional doctrine.

Together, they’ll tackle the questions at the center of this moment: Has the Supreme Court always been political? If so, why does it feel different today? And if Americans are losing faith in the Court, what does that mean for the future of checks and balances in a democracy?

Kent Greenfield, Professor of Law and the Dr. Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School is moderating the conversation.

Speakers

Peter Canellos

Peter S. Canellos is an award-winning journalist, author, and former executive editor of Politico. His latest book, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, explores the rise of the conservative legal movement and its impact on the Supreme Court. He is also the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, one of Publishers Weekly‘s top nonfiction books of 2021. A former Boston Globe editorial page editor and Washington bureau chief, Canellos has earned national recognition for his writing on the Supreme Court, law, and American politics.

Rachel Shelden

Rachel A. Shelden is a historian of nineteenth-century America and Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, where she also directs the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. Her research explores the intersections of politics, constitutionalism, law, and slavery, with a particular focus on the role of personal relationships and political networks. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War and the forthcoming The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History, which examines the political world of Supreme Court justices in the nineteenth century. A frequent public speaker on constitutional history and American political culture, Shelden received her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield is Professor of Law and the Dr. Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. A leading scholar of constitutional law, democratic institutions, and the Supreme Court, he is a frequent commentator in national and international media, including NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and Fox News. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Secession: Why Our Country Should Split Up (and How to Do It Peacefully), and has written extensively on constitutional law, civil rights, and the challenges facing American democracy. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School, Greenfield clerked for Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.