University of Michigan Law School Professor Leah Litman spoke to Mehdi Hasan on Thursday about her new book, which details the way that conservatives on the Supreme Court have "embraced" "unabashed lawlessness."
The book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, uses a lot of pop culture references to make complex legal matters more straightforward for non-lawyers.
Speaking to Hasan, Litman compared the conservatives on the High Court to the popular, high-school clique "The Plastics," from the film "Mean Girls." Led by sociopath Regina George, the girls influence the social hierarchy in a U.S. high school through manipulation and cruelty.
“I need people to be socialized in a very different picture of the Supreme Court and understand how what's happening today is the product of a much longer political and social movement that has designs on many big things,” Litman told Mehdi.
Litman explained that she and her co-host began their podcast in 2019 during the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She said that many people didn't appear to fully appreciate the significance of the change on the court.
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"I personally think that conservative grievance is a little bit of a fringe theory, you know. It is divorced from facts and reality. But I think the justices' allegiance to a Republican Party that has leaned into minority rule has led them to embrace some fringe theories that are pretty antithetical to a liberal constitutional democracy," she told Alliance For Justice in a different interview on Wednesday. "And are just strange, weird, and odd on their own terms."
She said that at that time, far too many people assumed that the court would remain unbiased and non-political. Even during the debate over whether the Supreme Court would eliminate Roe, the landmark ruling over abortion privacy, Litman said that folks ignored the coming ruling.
That leads into what the court has become today. Litman says in the book that the goal is not merely to eliminate abortion, but part of a larger plan of building a society that looks more like 1950 than 2050.
"It is one step on a larger journey to restore a gender hierarchy in which 'The Kens' dominate public life," Litman writes, dropping a reference to the "Barbie" movie.
Hasan wanted to know what was next in the attacks on women, and Litman expects it'll continue with medication abortion and contraception.
"We've already seen them make some moves where they allow governments to classify certain forms of contraception as abortifacients and therefore allow businesses to get out of providing contraception coverage," Litman said.
She said that the next step will be when the Donald Trump government begins to restrict contraception if the Supreme Court considers some forms of contraception to be abortion. The next is fetal personhood, she cautioned.
The case involving the website designer who didn't want to make a gay marriage website, she argued, was a "made-up case," that made no sense, she said. She also wasn't hired by a gay couple to make a same-sex wedding website for them.
She said that there are several similar cases that follow the same strategy, working through the courts.
Litman closed by giving her suggestions, the first being not to obey in advance.
“I am hesitant to suggest people should be obeying in advance, basically, by assuming the courts lack all authority and just saying there's nothing they can do," she said.
She also argued that there are ways that things can be done.
“Aside from just saying you're in contempt, marshals go get them, they can actually launch a criminal case.”
What ‘Mean Girls’ and Republican Supreme Court Justices Have in Common by Mehdi Hasan
Mehdi speaks to the author of a new book on the court, who unpacks the many ways in which judges can actually hold Trump and his acolytes to account.
Read on Substack