On the Authority of the Supreme Court
40 Pages Posted: 31 Jul 2022
Date Written: July 9, 2022
Abstract
Of late, the Court itself has both defended its own moral authority, and has also presented grounds for questioning that moral authority. Neither these defenses nor these critical assessments are confined to any Supreme Court political grouping. This debate within the Court itself as to its own morally binding authority very roughly corresponds to parallel debates among the public, as well as among jurisprudentially oriented writers.
If there is any simply-stated bottom line, it is that the Court may well not hold much genuinely binding moral authority, and the general public may itself be ambivalent on that question. On the other hand, the Court may not actually need much genuine, or much publicly perceived, moral authority in order to perform most of its work.
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