The Activist Roberts Court, 10 Years In
And even when a majority of the justices rejected conservative arguments, the decision to hear those cases in the first place showed the court’s eagerness to reopen long-settled issues. For example, in last month’s ruling on the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the court held 5 to 4 that discrimination could be illegal under the law even if there was no evidence that it was intentional. This might seem to be a “liberal” result, except that 11 federal appeals courts had agreed on this reading for decades. There was no legal dispute, in other words, only the persistent efforts of some justices to reverse accepted law because they didn’t like it.
In this light, “the string of liberal ‘victories’ represents disasters averted, not new frontiers discovered,” wrote Garrett Epps, the Supreme Court correspondent for The Atlantic.