Almost everyone on the Left seems to have lost faith in the Supreme Court of the United States. This would have been improbable in 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, or in 1973, after Roe v. Wade, or even in 1992, after the court upheld the core holding of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But after over twenty years of the conservative John Roberts serving as chief justice, including over half a decade of him leading a court with a 6–3 conservative supermajority, liberals and progressives no longer turn to the court with any real hope. If anything, they view it with hostility.

Some on the Left — most recently Lisa Graves and Leah Litman — have portrayed the Roberts Court as a wrecking ball that has “rewritten the Constitution” and “dismantled our rights.” Others think that the court has never really protected our rights and that we were deluded to ever trust such an inherently reactionary institution. While these tendencies have overlapped at various junctures, the more radical critiques of the court have generally been confined to the socialist left: the pages of Jacobin, rather than the Harvard Law Review.

Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan’s new book, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People, is an exception to this rule. The authors are not only Harvard law professors but former clerks for two of the most celebrated progressive justices in the history of the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Their book is not a tragic story of how the Roberts Court betrayed the great liberal traditions of Brown and Roe. It aims at something more fundamental: the almost unconscious and unanimous acceptance — by both conservatives and progressives — of the principle that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of all constitutional disputes.