Fordham Law professors Tracy Higgins, Abner Greene, and Ethan Leib join Julie Suk on the Constitutional Crisis Hotline to analyze the major cases of the Supreme Court Term that just ended, and then debate about the public criticisms of the Court’s legitimacy.

In the last few weeks, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action programs, calling into question whether institutions can promote diversity in race conscious ways.  It protected the free expression of a Christian website designer who opposes same-sex marriage against a Colorado law that would require her to offer her services to same-sex couples. The Court also struck down President Biden's effort to forgive student loan debt during the pandemic.  Is the Court redefining the policy landscape on a broad range of socially divisive issues?  Do these decisions--taken together with its decisions last Term on abortion and guns--call the Court's legitimacy into question?  What are we talking about when we question the Court's legitimacy anyway?  And what cases should we look out for this coming Fall?

Recent decisions discussed:

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University

Allen v. Milligan

303 Creative v. Elenis

Sackett v. EPA

Biden v. Nebraska

Upcoming cases to watch:

U.S. v. Rahimi

Netchoice v. Paxton (if the Court decides to grant cert.)

Alexander v. South Carolina

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo

Corey Brettschneider is a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, where he has taught constitutional law courses for several years.  He is also a Professor of Political Science at Brown University.  He is the author of several books on constitutional law and political theory, and editor of the Penguin Liberty series--a collection of historical, political and legal classics that speak to modern issues of liberty and constitutional rights.  Brettschneider is also a frequent commentator in the media since the Trump presidency on the presidency and the Constitution, including the law and politics of prosecuting and suing a president.

Read the book The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents.

Read his 2018 Washington Post piece in on the law of indicting presidents.

Read his 2019 New York Times piece on the law of presidential immunity.

Constitutional Crisis Hotline co-host Julie Suk argues in a new book that misogyny is the overempowerment of men and the collective overentitlement of society to women’s forbearance, pain, and sacrifices for the common good. Misogyny not woman-hatred alone; it is the legal structure that enables that hatred and extracts benefits to society at women’s expense. In this conversation, occurring in the moment that Donald Trump was finally indicted for concealing his hush-money payments to a porn actress, and a federal judge in Texas invalidated abortion pills, Deb Tuerkheimer and Julie Suk explore how this reframing of misogyny sheds light on abortion bans, and how women in U.S. history and around the world today have sought constitutional changes to reset male entitlement and power.

Deborah Tuerkheimer Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Professor Tuerkeheimer is a former prosecutor and leading expert on the law of sexual assault. She is the author of the landmark book Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers (2021) and co-author of the textbook Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials. 

Read Julie C. Suk’s book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It (2023).