Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People

From two acclaimed legal scholars, a new history of the Supreme Court that overturns our most basic assumptions about its role in our democracy, showing how it seized the power it now wields.

The Supreme Court claims the extraordinary power to strike down laws passed by Congress—and for more than a century now, it has used this power to undermine democracy. But does the Constitution force us to live under the rule of nine robed lawyers? In this remarkable work, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan dismantle “judicial supremacy,” the myth that the Court should have the final say on what the Constitution means. Far from an eternal principle, judicial supremacy gained prominence only in response to Reconstruction, when the Court took it upon itself to safeguard the interests of capital and white supremacy.

Bowie and Renan trace how this distorted vision of constitutional authority has remade the country. Along the way, they challenge how liberals understand the Court’s most celebrated rulings, showing that the left has unwittingly subscribed to the very ideology that now threatens it. Recovering a lost constitutional tradition—one forged by abolitionists, labor leaders, and civil rights pioneers—Supremacy calls for power to be returned to where the Constitution put it: Congress.