The University of Chicago The Law School

In recent Supreme Court terms, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson have issued defiant dissents that push back against a seemingly endless cascade of conservative opinions. The three tend to take somewhat different approaches. Kagan has typically focused on exposing the majority’s shoddy reasoning, Sotomayor has underscored its complicity in wrong, and Jackson has placed it within larger systems of oppression. One might think, just skimming the dissents, that everything is as it should be: The Court takes cases. It hears arguments, and it votes.

Edwin Eisendrath is joined by Allison LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

LaCroix discussed the evolving nature of federalism and states' rights. She explained that federalism involves distributed power among national, state, and local governments, tracing its roots to the British Empire and the American colonial period.

For many legal scholars, being cited even a single time in a judicial decision is a rare and validating achievement.

That’s what made June 27 an especially momentous day in the career of new University of Chicago law professor Samuel Bray, whose scholarship on the topic of universal injunctions was cited over a dozen times by the Supreme Court in the case Trump v. CASA.