This Robert Cover Workshop will start a dialogue about the urgent need for a programmatic legal movement to restore the Supreme Court to its proper constitutional role of facilitating democracy and protecting equality and fundamental liberties.
Since 2007, the Roberts Court has issued a series of decisions deeply subversive of constitutional democracy. It has dismantled democratically enacted policies such as affirmative action, sensible gun regulations, and the Voting Rights Act; enabled the corruption of the electoral process via gerrymandering and dark money; crippled the administrative state; and overruled longstanding precedent protecting rights of personal autonomy.
The Roberts Court must be thoroughly discredited and rejected for being one of the worst, undemocratic Supreme Court eras in history. To that end, this workshop will lay the groundwork for legal scholars to start building a robust body of scholarship/teaching which both deconstructs the jurisprudence of the Roberts Court, and constructs an alternative jurisprudence of democracy. That body of work should equip progressive lawyers and judges with the tools to do the work of reconstruction, and empower political movements with the language of change to engage in effective mobilization.