Legal Discourse and Our Discontents [TEASER]

Elena Kagan this summer says that the Supreme Court has been damaging its legitimacy.

Is she right?

In my view, yes.

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this subscriber-only episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about the state of Supreme Court media coverage.

Almost exactly one year ago, the beginning of the 6-3 era, the hosts talked about how the legal media establishment was was failing to accurately depict the court's extreme rightward shift.

Since that episode aired, the steady stream of plainly partisan decisions coming out of the court have forced some commentators to reassess their assumptions.

So this is something I never expected to worry about in the United States, the risk that we could have election subversion, that the person who gets the most votes won't be declared the winner of the election.

Nevertheless, the ecosystem of thought leaders who propped up the court's legitimacy for so long remains in place.

And your hosts are here, as ever, ever, to yank their heads out of the sand.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have created our civil rights, like inflation has created the S ⁇ P 500.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

I hope our listeners don't care about that much.

How's your portfolio, Dean?

Yeah.

I'm trying to slowly transition us into being a stocks and business podcast.

Okay, so Rhiannon out then.

If you don't want that money, sure.

But we're going to get those crypto sponsors soon.

And

that's when it really takes off for us.

A couple of housekeeping notes up top.

Rhiannon, live from our our studio in New York City.

Yeah, prologue.

Hello.

Hi.

Neither Michael nor I are in studio, but still, nice to see you there.

Yeah, yeah.

Peter lives in this city.

I'm in the city.

The only time we're so busy with the podcast that the only time we see each other is podcast stuff and we're not still not even together or hanging out.

That's true.

The other note is I'm a little bit congested, a little bit sick.

I want to warn everyone because I

went away for the weekend and partied a little bit.

And I know everyone thinks like, oh, Peter probably does tons of drugs and just parties with hot chicks all the time and he can hold it together.

But actually, no, if I do one drug, I will be sick all week.

And that's what happened.

We're getting old.

We're feeling those years.

This is a special episode about the state of what you might call the legal discourse ecosystem.

We are now in the wake of one of the most impactful Supreme Court terms in history, where the court's conservative supermajority asserted itself and pushed its far-right views across a spectrum of legal issues.

We started this podcast because we felt the discourse surrounding the Supreme Court from media coverage to academic discussions was failing to grasp the true nature of the the institution.

We understood the court to be political and ideological and the conservatives on the court to be the direct output of an orchestrated right-wing legal movement.

People within the legal media ecosystem, from journalists and pundits to legal academics, did not talk about the court like that.

They talked about the court as if it were a legitimate and apolitical institution.

And moreover, their livelihoods were often wrapped up in the idea of the court as a legitimate and a political institution.

Right.

And so the worldviews of these actors are important because they shape political discourse, right?

They put out op-eds.

They appear on cable news.

They publish law review articles.

And all of these things influence both public and elite opinion.

And the failure of these actors to understand the nature of the court has led to a lot of people getting blindsided by this past term.

But given the court's recent rulings, especially the overturning of Roe v.

Wade, we've started to see some legal academics and legal journalists reckon with their misunderstandings and adjust the way they talk about the court.

So we wanted to discuss the current state of the legal discourse.

Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe.

This episode is one of our premium Patreon-only episodes.

Membership starts at just five bucks a month.

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