This Thursday, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness program. Announced last August, Biden’s plan proposed relief of $10–20,000 for people below a certain income threshold. Soon met with a barrage of lawsuits, however, an injunction was placed on the program and its future remains uncertain.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Eleni Schirmer and her colleague Louise Seamster detailed their recent investigation of the remarkably flimsy legal case being mounted against student debt relief. Schirmer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia University Social Justice Centre in Montreal and an organizer for the Debt Collective, spoke to Jacobin’s Luke Savage about that investigation, the Biden administration’s handling of the student debt file, and the ways America’s legal system continues to show deference to corporate interests while hanging ordinary people out to dry.