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September 30, 2022

Alito Pushes Back After Justice Kagan Warns Supreme Court's Legitimacy Has Suffered
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A new poll finds public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court at a historic
low. Less than half of U.S. adults polled by Gallup report they have "a
great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust in the Supreme Court. That's a
20-percentage-point drop from two years ago. This comes amid fractures
between the Supreme Court's conservative majority and liberal justices
over whether the court's legitimacy has been damaged by recent rulings
overturning decades of precedent. Justice Elena Kagan has repeatedly
spoken out over the issue during the court's summer recess. Here she is
speaking at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law on
September 14.

Justice Elena Kagan: "When we're talking about legitimacy of the court,
it prevents people from thinking that it's all about politics. I mean,
if a new judge comes in, if there's new members of a court, and all of a
sudden everything is up for grabs, all of a sudden very fundamental
principles of law are being overthrown, are being, you know, replaced,
then people have a right to say, like, you know, 'What's going on there?
That doesn't seem very law-like.'"

Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision in June allowing
states to once again ban abortions, told The Wall Street Journal this
week, "[S]aying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate
institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line."
Chief Justice John Roberts has also criticized Justice Kagan's remarks.


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