Supreme Court Archives - Public Seminar

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Paradoxes of Free Speech

How the amplification of limitless speech acts can silence others

February 21, 2023 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Our culture’s fetishizing of self-expression, apparently without any limits, is paradoxically undermining free speech....

Politics

Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Privacy

The legal right to privacy is very old. It’s just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.

July 12, 2022 • by Jill Filipovic

All of a sudden, privacy rights matter to the same conservatives who just stripped women of ours—because powerful men are seeing their privacy violated....

Activism

Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Thou Shalt Not Lie

These anti-abortion activists lure clients in by posing as medical facilities—but local ordinances can force them to tell the truth or close

July 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

As important is the sense of despair many liberals and progressives feel when we throw our collective weight behind gambits and activism that are unlikely to yield tangible success. But here’s another idea. What if we all looked at how we could support reproductive rights in our own communities—and not ...

Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Thou Shalt Not Lie

Past Present

Religious Schooling and Church-State Separation

Past Present Podcast, Episode 332

June 28, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: In a victory for proponents of school choice and a major weakening of church-state separation, Maine will now be required to provide state funding to religious schools. Neil cited this Slate article about the ruling, and Natalia drew on this ...

Religious Schooling and Church-State Separation

Activism

Continuous Protest outside the Supreme Court

A photo essay

June 27, 2022 • by Jo Freeman

Thousands of people congregated outside the Supreme Court on June 24, shortly after the Court announced that it was overturning Roe v. Wade. That 1973 decision had held that states could not regulate women’s right to an abortion prior to the viability of the fetus. People came and went throughout the ...

Continuous Protest outside the Supreme Court

Sex & Gender

What Unenumerated Rights Are Guaranteed in Samuel Alito’s World?

The Supreme Court’s majority may abort the right to privacy—but we’ll always have the right to secrecy and shame

June 13, 2022 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Like abortion, contraception has always existed in some form. And like abortion, contraception was also left unmentioned by the authors of the Constitution, who relied upon high infant mortality rates to take care of family planning....

What Unenumerated Rights Are Guaranteed in Samuel Alito’s World?

Activism

Young Women Rally for Abortion outside Supreme Court

A photo essay

May 9, 2022 • by Jo Freeman

Roughly a hundred young women gathered outside the Supreme Court on May 6 to rally for abortion rights. This was one of several pro-choice demonstrations during the first week of May. In abortion demonstrations last fall, young women were mostly on the pro-life side. Those on the pro-choice side were ...

Young Women Rally for Abortion outside Supreme Court

Sex & Gender

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Never forget that banning abortion has always been a minority position in this country, one that does not represent the will of the voters.

May 3, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Outlawing abortion is the outcome of a radical conservative minority. The success of this minority has been entirely driven by megadonors and organizations that create voter turnout through disinformation and motivating extremists. The notion that a cluster of cells that cannot survive outside a human host, one that has no ...

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Politics

Race and Redistricting

Gerrymandering is old, but the prohibition of racial gerrymandering is a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s success

March 15, 2022 • by Jo Freeman

Eventually, all legislatures conformed to the Supreme Court’s mandate that the only basis for representation was population. States where one party dominated the legislature gerrymandered to consolidate its position. In states with large minority populations which largely voted for one major party and whites the other, party gerrymandering became racial ...

Past Present

Justice Breyer’s Retirement and the Future of the Supreme Court

Past Present Podcast, Episode 311

February 1, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has announced he will retire at the end of his term, a move many say is reflective of his pragmatism. Natalia referred to this New York Times piece about Breyer’s effort to eschew ideology and ...

Constitutional Politics

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

October 12, 2021 • by Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn

Aziz Rana’s genealogy of American constitutional veneration overturns the conventional wisdom, not merely about the chronology, but also about the reasons for this worshipful attitude towards a document drafted in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, his forthcoming book, Rise of the Constitution, is politically explosive: for it ...

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Politics

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

Is there incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy?

September 28, 2021 • by John Stoehr

Last week, opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about the sinking reputation of the United States Supreme Court. With respect to a new abortion law in Texas, which invalidates Roe v. Wade, the Post columnist said that, “The nub of the problem is not that (or not only that) voters are angry that the court allowed ...

Supreme Court

Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Privacy

The legal right to privacy is very old. It’s just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Thou Shalt Not Lie

These anti-abortion activists lure clients in by posing as medical facilities—but local ordinances can force them to tell the truth or close

Religious Schooling and Church-State Separation

Past Present Podcast, Episode 332

Continuous Protest outside the Supreme Court

A photo essay

What Unenumerated Rights Are Guaranteed in Samuel Alito’s World?

The Supreme Court’s majority may abort the right to privacy—but we’ll always have the right to secrecy and shame

Young Women Rally for Abortion outside Supreme Court

A photo essay

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Never forget that banning abortion has always been a minority position in this country, one that does not represent the will of the voters.

Race and Redistricting

Gerrymandering is old, but the prohibition of racial gerrymandering is a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s success

Justice Breyer’s Retirement and the Future of the Supreme Court

Past Present Podcast, Episode 311

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

Is there incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy?

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