Chris Geidner: The Supreme Court's men aren't here to protect you

https://www.lawdork.com/p/the-supreme-courts-men-arent-here

This week’s arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court were disturbing. They also, however, can and should serve as a warning siren. Attention on the courts must be centered in our political discussions to ensure that our courts can serve as a protective possibility for individuals and, when called upon to do so, will serve as a backstop against tyranny.

Twenty-one years ago this spring, I was a first-year law student at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. I was beginning to work for a professor on research for writing that he was doing surrounding Lawrence v. Texas. It was the first time I’d read every brief — including every amicus curiae brief — filed in a U.S. Supreme Court case, and that work for Marc Spindelman taught me more about what ended up becoming my career than perhaps anything else that I did in law school.

In doing so, I learned much about the Supreme Court and the way law is handled at the high court — with history, experiences across the country, and our neighbors across the globe all providing relevant, but not definitive, frames of reference for understanding any case and the statutes or constitutional provisions at issue in that case.

Twenty-one years later, that experience is increasingly irrelevant to understanding any case. While textualism and originalism were supposed to be, we were told, our touchstones for interpretation under the conservatives’ legal vision for America, we heard little of that from the court’s conservative men on Thursday when Donald Trump’s immunity claim came to the justices. Then, text and history were inconveniences.

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