Above the Fray? Rethinking The Supreme Court Independence – First Parish Church
First Parish Church, 1446 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
Was the Supreme Court ever what we thought it was? Public trust in the Supreme Court is near a three-decade low, according to Pew Research Center: only 45% of Americans currently view the Court favorably, down 20 points from 2021, with Republicans and Democrats now divided by 44 percentage points in how they see it. Most Americans, across party lines, still say justices shouldn’t let politics shape their rulings, and most also believe, increasingly, that they do. But is that a new failure, or a return to an older reality we’ve simply forgotten? Was there ever a Court that stood apart from politics, or did we just get better, for a while, at believing in one? Rachel A. Shelden, author of The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History , has spent her career studying how the Court actually operated in its first century, long before the modern ideal of judicial neutrality took hold. Peter S. Canellos, author of Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement , has spent his time tracing how one justice’s life story became constitutional doctrine. Together, they’ll tackle the questions at the center of this moment: Has the Supreme Court always…