An excellent guide to how the Supreme Court runs on conservative grievance, fringe theories, and bad vibes

Something is deeply rotten at the Supreme Court. How did we get here and what can we do about it? Crooked Media podcast host Leah Litman shines a light on the unabashed lawlessness embraced by conservative Supreme Court justices and shows us how to fight back.

With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials whose views are no longer shared by a majority of the country.

Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice meets Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad as Litman employs pop culture references and the latest decisions to deliver a funny, zeitgeisty, pulls-no-punches cri de coeur undergirded by impeccable scholarship. She gives us the tools we need to understand the law, the dynamics of courts, and the stakes of this current moment — even as she makes us chuckle on every page and emerge empowered to fight for a better future.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Strict Scrutiny, the podcast that Leah Litman co-hosts with Kate Shaw and Melissa Murray, so when Lawless was announced, it immediately went on my must-read list. I was lucky enough to get an advance DRC, and I dove right in. It’s a highly engaging and informative book, and one of the first must-reads of the year.

As someone who has been reading about and researching American politics for a two-and-a-half decades, Lawless was a very satisfying read: there were so many moments in this book that reaffirmed my own observations and interpretations of Republican politics (albeit, Litman’s book is far better written than anything I could come up with).

“Republicans have come to believe the dwindling support for their increasingly fringe views wrongs them. Yet even though they represent a minority of the country, Republicans remain more politically powerful than ever.”

The central premise, in particular, is convincing (and, in my interpretation, absolutely correct): Republican politics, and therefore now also the Supreme Court, operates on conservative grievance, manufactured “persecution”, and the appropriation of “victim” labels. The centrality, in fact, of Republican politics has come to form the basis of their jurisprudence, as they “reason in the register of party talking points”: it is law (and a world-view) driven by “grievance, entitlement, and a general antipathy toward democracy”. (To me, it seems like the Republican Justices on the Supreme Court are determined to enshrine into law the fact that Republicans are delicate snowflakes.)

Whether it is LGBTQ rights, voting and civil rights, free speech, money in politics, Litman does a fantastic job providing examples of how the Republican Justices have twisted the law (and not infrequently their own stated ideology) to suggest that conservatives, the religious, Republicans, and the wealthy are actually the persecuted classes in America.

The author offers an excellent balance of history and contemporary analysis, and there is likely plenty of information and context in Lawless that even committed followers of American politics won’t know. I thought I was quite informed already, but every chapter was packed with new-to-me information..

There is plenty in these pages that should make any American concerned. Litman offers a passionate and clear-eyed critique of the Court and American politics as a whole, and how the two have become enmeshed. There is also a note of caution against those who think that SCOTUS is off-limits, and the institution-has-to-be-respected crowd. (Ironically, Scalia, one of the greatest wreckers on the Court, is perhaps the most whiny member of this group.)

“Panicked warnings about politicizing the Court miss the point. Refusing to acknowledge the Court is political and refusing to engage in any kind of politics vis-à-vis the Court is unilateral disarmament.”

Anyone who has watched the Supreme Court’s strange devolution over the past few years, and the “opinions [that] are driven not by law, but by vibes”, should read this book. It’s informative, engaging, well-structured, well-argued, and often amusing. Litman’s writing is accessible, and does an excellent job of balancing the more-technical legal language with translations for us lay-folk.

Definitely recommended to anyone with an interest in contemporary US politics and the history of how the Supreme Court has morphed into its strange, broken and twisted form.

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Leah Litman’s Lawless is due to be published by Atria/One Signal in North America, on May 13th.

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Review copy received via Edelweiss