Georgetown Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck talked about the shortcomings of the current U.S. Supreme Court and how its role in the American legal system has evolved at a recent lecture he gave at Fordham Law School.
As the 2025 Coif Distinguished Visitor, Vladeck spoke to a standing-room only audience and argued that the current Supreme Court is more emboldened than in the past. He faulted the current court for its “mentality that the court is not and ought not to be accountable to the other branches.”
Historically, the court “was in conversation with Congress,” he said. “It was a court that was looking over its shoulder. It was a court that was balancing the difficulty of being unelected judges in a democracy who still have a responsibility to stand for the democracy,” he said. “The court we have is a court that’s less interested in all that stuff.”
At the same time, the court is facing unprecedented public scrutiny. Vladeck said the current Supreme Court has the lowest public approval rating in its history. He also said it’s doing considerably less work than earlier courts, citing a study which found that the current Court has issued fewer decisions than any other court since 1864. “This is a symptom of the same disease,” he said. “A court that’s doing less and less because of all of the power it has accumulated, because of all of the control it has accumulated, because it does what it wants.”
Stephen Vladeck’s New York Times bestseller, The Shadow Docket
Fordham Law Professor Julie Suk, who provided commentary after the lecture, asked, “Is the court that we want one that’s more representative of the views of the people, or just less arrogant?”
Valdeck highlighted the importance of institutional accountability over personal character in his response, “Historically, it was not that we had justices who were saints or justices who were geniuses or justices who were good people. It was that we had justices who didn’t think they were on an island.”
Despite its shortcomings, Vladeck made a strong case for the necessity of the Supreme Court, “The court we need is a court that actually has broad credibility. It’s a court that progressives and conservatives alike may not agree with its decisions, but actually think it has the right kind of institutional relationship, that think it is worth defending, think its decisions are worth enforcing—the likes of which the current court has lost.”
An accomplished legal scholar and expert on constitutional law, Vladeck is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Shadow Docket, a member of the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center, a CNN Supreme Court analyst, and the author of the popular newsletter One First, which demystifies complex Supreme Court matters. During his two-day visit to Fordham, he spoke with several classes about his research on the Supreme Court and national security issues.
A Fordham Law student in the audience asked him, “With such a powerful institution, what can we, the average person or the average law student, actually feel empowered to do about it?”
Vladeck’s answer was a hopeful one: to keep the conversation going. “We should be invested in bolstering the Court as an institution,” said Vladeck, “so that it can actually serve its job in our constitutional system.”
