Daphna Renan

This is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On today's special episode of 5 to 4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are interviewing friends of the pod and Harvard law professors Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan about their book, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People.

Now, you may have noticed a vibe shift going on politically when it comes to the Supreme Court.

More and more politicians and legal analysts are admitting that something is really wrong, and remedies that were once considered radical, like court packing, are becoming more mainstream.

We actually have a couple of guests coming on the pod today, a couple of Harvard law professors.

Ooh.

Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan.

You said Harvard?

But there's a lot of interesting work now by legal scholars.

I'm thinking of Daphna Renan and Niko Bowie at Harvard.

They have a new book coming out-

Mm

[upbeat music] Hi, everyone.

I'm here with Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan, professors at Harvard Law School and the authors of the great new book, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People.

Welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, Niko and Daphna.

Thanks for having us.

You know, would voters when they see Congress trying to enforce its law against the Court, would they say, "I'm sorry, judicial independence means you shouldn't touch the Court with this anti-bribery law," or would they say, "Please, you know, we, we need a better country"? And we wrote this book to try to encourage more people to think of that hypothetical and demand that Congress act to enforce what the Constitution really intuitively means, as opposed to this really counterintuitive form of constitutional democracy we've inherited, in which we have this, you know, supreme body- That is making all of the decisions for us, but that we can't even, you know, elect or, or hold accountable.

So that seems like a perfect place to end.

Um, I want to thank again Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan, uh, for joining, and their book, again, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People, is out this week.

You can get it at all of your favorite booksellers, including bookshop.org. And if you do purchase the book before tomorrow, Friday, 5:00 Eastern, you can enter to win a giveaway, this Overrule Judicial Supremacy T-shirt or a mug.

The last ruling the three dissenting justices have warned effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, rendering him immune even if he organizes a military coup or orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.

Two of Sunstein's Harvard colleagues, Nicholas Bowie and Daphna Renan, take a different approach.

In their formidable, sharply argued book, Supremacy, published by Norton, they distinguish two often conflated powers.

The power of vertical review allows the Supreme Court to invalidate state and local laws that in the justices' view, contradict federal ones.

She noted that her four-year-old son, Nico, had spontaneously proposed some when adjudicating which game a group of children should play.

That four-year-old, Nicholas Bowie, is now a Harvard law professor and in a different mood.

His book with Daphna Renan vigorously defends majority rule against institutional impediments.

The two authors cling to Congress, which they deem more democratic than the Supreme Court.

Jill Lepore has been writing about it now.

Nico Bui is writing about it with Daphna Renan.

There's a whole uptick of books about the idea that we don't actually have to be enthralled to this nine-member juristocracy that decides every single issue dispositively for all time.

And that in fact, and I'll end here, but for a very, very short period of time, Like, a couple of decades have we had this notion that the Supreme Court get to be the final, ultimate, irrevocable arbiters of constitutional meaning.