Essays

James Gibson and Michael Nelson have written another compelling paper examining how Americans think about the Supreme Court. Their essential finding is that various versions of criticisms of the Court made by President Donald J. Trump are not substantially undermining public support for the Court. This Reply—prepared for a symposium held at the New York University School of Law—questions how much this and related papers tell us about how people think about the Court when they actually care about the Court. This study and other important ones like it are measuring how people think about the Court when the policy implications of Court decisions are presented to subjects as relatively low. Their findings tell us a lot, but not everything. They do not tell us what happens when passions about the Court are high—precisely the moment when the Court could be at its greatest jeopardy and convincing people to believe in the Court for reasons independent of the policies it delivers is the hardest. We can have confidence about how people think about the Court when they do not care about it, but not how they think about it when they do.

In this essay, I argue that a constitutional scheme grounded in the Rule of Law cannot rely primarily on a self-executing, mechanistic vision of Madison’s ambitious branches checking one another. Rather, “We the People” depend on self-regulation—in the form of constitutional good faith—by the vast majority of our constitutional actors. I then offer a meditation on the nature of good faith required for healthy American constitutionalism.