NPEC Presents: The Supreme Court is (NOT) Your Friend
Start: 2025-02-27 19:00:00 UTC Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)
Event Type:
Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Please join us Thursday February 27th at 7:00 PM ET as DSA's National Political Education Committee interviews Yale Professor Samuel Moyn and Harvard Professor Ryan Doerfler on the history of left criticism of the institution of the Supreme Court. With the reality of a multigenerational right-wing control of the Supreme Court, now is the time to discuss the very nature of why such an institution like the Supreme Court is a detriment for democratic governance and possible ways to change it. Like how DSA has called for the limiting of Judicial Review, the Professors argue that progressive calls to reclaim the judiciary miss deeper issues of democracy and argue that we should disempower courts exercising lawmaking authority—including when they are interpreting statutes. Ultimately they argue complete reallocation of interpretive authority over the law should be brought back to the “political” branches of government, where there can be open political debate and control over the issues at hand.
Professor Doerfler’s research focuses on the role of the judiciary within a democratic system. His recent work includes a critical reassessment of the embrace of judicial review within the liberal legal tradition and an analysis of the relationship between theories of statutory and constitutional interpretation and a fundamental commitment to democratic self-rule. Doefler's academic work has been published in numerous leading law journals. His popular writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Dissent, Jacobin, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Professor Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College. Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. He has also written books about the history of international law and human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History; Christian Human Rights; Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World; and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. Moyn has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
