The US Supreme Court has had a tumultuous year: in December 2021, a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the White House raised serious questions about the future of the Court, its size and jurisdiction. Since then, it has seen key opinions leaked, and emails suggesting the involvement of Justice Thomas’ wife, Ginny, in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
More recently it has issued a range of extremely contentious opinions, on gun control, school prayer, the administrative state, and most notably constitutional rights of access to abortion. The Supreme Court, in short, is in crisis. But how did it get here? What would recent Justices have made of where we are now? And what is the path out for the Court?
In this lunchtime seminar hosted by the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, UNSW Professor Rosalind Dixon and UOW Associate Professor Markus Wagner explored these questions in conversation with US constitutional law scholar, Professor Amanda Tyler, Shannon C. Turner Professor of Law at Berkeley Law and former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and leading public and academic commentator on the US Supreme Court.
