This week on the NYR Online, David Cole and Sean Wilentz look at the Supreme Court’s 2023–2024 term. Cole surveys the breadth of the year’s cases—on questions relating to abortion, gun rights, free speech, voting rights, the Eighth Amendment, executive authority, and administrative law—and finds that, by a consistent 6–3 vote, the Court’s Republican justices “extended substantial new rights to hedge fund managers, big business, and former president Donald Trump, while denying constitutional protection to homeless people punished for sleeping in public, Black voters in South Carolina, and an American citizen whose noncitizen husband was denied a visa without explanation.”

Wilentz focuses on the question of presidential immunity and Trump v. United States, “the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history.” Building on two earlier essays he wrote before and after oral argument in the case, he argues that the majority opinion—which “gives any president carte blanche to commit crimes up to and including assassination and treason with virtual impunity from criminal prosecution”—is a “monumental historic disgrace.”

David Cole
The Supreme Court’s Power Grab

Conservative justices have abandoned modesty, humility, and fealty to precedent, instead voting as a bloc to conform the law to their preferences.

Sean Wilentz
‘The Dred Scott of Our Time’

The Supreme Court has invested the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, repudiating the foundational principle of the rule of law.

Sean Wilentz
The Immunity Con

For the first time in American history, the supreme judicial authority is parsing how much criminality to permit the chief executive.

—May 1, 2024

Sean Wilentz
Trump’s Delayed Reckoning

The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to grant Donald Trump criminal immunity—but its handling of the case has already worked in his favor.

—April 18, 2024

Free from the Archives

In Sean Wilentz’s essay about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, he contends that “the Roberts Court has descended to a level of shame reserved until now for the Roger B. Taney Court that decided the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.”

In the Review’s December 7, 1978, issue, C. Vann Woodward wrote about the Dred Scott case, both placing it in its historical setting and examining Taney’s opinion: “riddled with error, inconsistency, and misrepresentation, and full of bad law, inaccurate history, and flawed logic.”

C. Vann Woodward
A Dredful Decision

“The great failure of the Dred Scott decision, however, in David Potter’s words, lay in ‘pitting the Constitution against basic American values.’… The tragedy of the Taney court decision was that it fatally reversed the positions of slavery and freedom…. It was in all a disaster as judicial revision of the Constitution and ruinous as judicial legislation and policy making.”

Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
Get both The New York Review and The Paris Review at one low price.

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305