Last week, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defended himself before the Senate against allegations of sexual abuse. This week an FBI investigation is underway to uncover the truth about his past behavior amid the tangle of lies the judge has woven. Meanwhile, thousands of activists are blocking the streets and occupying offices to demand that Kavanaugh’s confirmation be rejected.

Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day sat down with Jedediah Purdy, left-wing legal scholar and professor of law at Duke University, to discuss the effect of the Kavanaugh crisis on the American popular conception of politics in the courts.

The Kavanaugh proceedings are saturated with “legitimating discourse around constitutional jurisprudence,” says Purdy, “which holds it up to be something ideally neutral and transcendent, which is compromised whenever politics is injected into it.” We should push back on that, he argues, fostering instead the recognition that “the courts are political, and that fights over the basic direction of institutions and the distribution of power in the country will always tend to involve the courts.” Only then can we begin to see how the courts might fit into the Left’s political struggle to build a better world.