Symposium—The Roberts Court: A Jurisprudential Era?
It might be tempting for political liberals, who would like to rely upon the United States Supreme Court to defend individual liberties and to sustain progressive legislation, to conclude that the sky has fallen. It started falling, of course, even before the tenure of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice. But with the appointment of John Roberts as Chief Justice and Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice, the transformation of the Court is accelerating. And the sky? Well, one can almost touch it. The modern Court can now be relied upon to strive to protect business interests against legislation designed to protect workers, consumers, and the environment; to halt the judicial expansion of personal liberty interests while expanding judicial protection of property interests; to interpret a “colorblind” Constitution by rolling back affirmative action and school-desegregation plans; to restrict access to courts by upping the ante on pleading requirements and statutes of limitation; and to weaken the boundaries between church and state. On these and many other issues, the Roberts Court’s advancement of the conservative political agenda is well underway. . . .