Archive
Browse all 4 articles across governance, urban systems, ecologies, and latitudes.
The Bench of Mirrors: Conservative Judicial Activism and the Roberts Court
In American law, 'activist' is the powdered sugar we throw on the bench when we want to make someone else's footprints more visible than our own. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has acted with strategic purpose—first under 'New Federalism,' then through the Roberts Court's project.
The Court That Rewrote America
The Roberts Court before and after 2020—how a jurisprudence of 'tradition' remapped power, rights, and the administrative state. Historians will draw a clean fold in the timeline of the Roberts Court. On one side (2005–2019): incrementalism with sharp elbows.
The Art of Calling Someone Else an Activist
Conservative judging since the 1980s—and the paradox of a movement that won by denouncing its own reflection. The term 'judicial activism' is the judiciary's favorite insult and our public square's dullest knife. Everyone uses it to describe the decisions they don't like; few define it before.
The Activists Who Said They Weren't
How a conservative legal movement rewrote American law from the 1980s to today. For forty years, the conservative legal movement has sold a deceptively simple ethic: judges should interpret, not make, the law. The method was restraint; the result was revolution.