The University of Chicago The Law School

Kate Shaw, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Will Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” to debate how the Supreme Court is handling the pressures of the Trump administration and to discuss the end of the court’s term

Five months into his second term, it is clear that Donald Trump is trying to remake American executive power in fundamental ways. He has taken a series of actions that openly violate the law, and complied with court orders only begrudgingly, often with significant foot-dragging. Meanwhile, he is undermining the authority of the courts rhetorically.

In 1943, in what would become one of the most famous opinions in the First Amendment canon, Justice Robert H. Jackson described the difficult task that courts faced when asked to apply the federal constitution’s rights guarantees to a world radically transformed from the one the Framers had encountered. The profound economic, social and political changes of the intervening hundred and fifty years, Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v.