I will graduate from law school next week. I matriculated in 2023 in hopes of one day joining the federal civil service, or perhaps working on Capitol Hill. I wanted to bring antitrust lawsuits, enforce financial regulations, and hopefully use the system as it is to make American life just a bit more equal and decent.

During my time in law school, the Supreme Court – which I have been educated to defer to, above all else – decided the following: 

• It is unconstitutional to even try to ensure that Black people’s votes affect the governments they live under.

• If the President of the United States tells a subordinate that he wishes to commit a crime, it is no longer a crime.

• Judges and Supreme Court justices are better qualified than scientists to decide how much poison is allowed in our air and drinking water. 

• Appearing Latino and speaking Spanish in public are sufficient grounds for masked men to beat someone, toss them in an unmarked van, and attempt to expel them from the nation.

• States may prevent children from receiving life-saving medical care if it would make government officials feel uncomfortable about gender.

• A city may criminalize homeless people sleeping at night. 

• States must allow parents to prohibit their children from learning accurate information about gender and sex. But states cannot prohibit indoctrination camps for conservative ideology about gender and sex.

Including decisions from shortly before I entered law school, the Supreme Court has also decided that:

• There is no fundamental right to control of one’s own body.

• Universities, the most prominent gatekeepers to opportunity in this country, must not try to undo America’s racial hierarchy.

• One of the only valid constraints on our country’s free market system is if the market’s norms could interfere with one’s right to be a bigot. 

During my first year of law school, my friends and I witnessed a genocide play out in real time on our social media feeds. A young settler-colonial nation launched a war of extermination against the older, native inhabitants of the land it occupies. The settler-colonists were determined to seize territory and impose a society based on racial subordination, and eliminate any claim that the native peoples ever had on their land. That year, my classmates and I read the McIntosh decision, in which Chief Justice John Marshall – the first-ever Supreme Court Justice, and a somewhat sainted figure for that – ruled that indigenous people have no right to American land, because America has conquered them.

That spring, some students at fellow universities tried to use their purported Constitutional rights to voice anger at the genocidaire country committing the crime of crimes. Their university expelled them, their city’s brute squad arrested them, and their Senator called them criminals. I tried to get my small city to pass a purely symbolic resolution denouncing genocide, the most evil act human beings are capable of. It didn’t happen.

In my second year, our country re-elected a fascist, an ideological compatriot of the leader of the genocidaire nation. With the help of an avowed white nationalist, who is also the wealthiest man alive, our new leader seized control of the nation’s finances, violating our supposedly sacrosanct founding document and functionally nullifying the federal legislature. The white nationalist proceeded to dismantle the federal civil service I’d hoped to join after school, and the fascist leader deployed masked men to terrorize racial minorities and send them to offshore concentration and torture camps.

None of this drew any objection from the Supreme Court. Some of it they explicitly endorsed. That semester, my professors informed me that the Supreme Court is our nation’s bulwark against strongmen, and its justices are the last great protectors of minority rights and the separation of powers.

Our new national leader soon began defunding universities he deemed disloyal. Concerned, I sent a letter to my school’s deans asking what they would do if the campaign reached us. They pulled me into a private meeting, where they thanked me for the letter, then unsubtly urged me to stop agitating about this – the plan, you see, was to keep our heads down and hope that no one in D.C. realized we exist. Meanwhile, at a panel on “the new administration’s changes to federal policy,” one of my professors told concerned students not to worry that Trump had eliminated integration mandates and was turning antidiscrimination law into an express tool of white supremacy. After all, he smiled, all of this could be reversed in four years by the next President. Such is the genius of our Constitution. 

The facade cracked once in my third year. While lecturing about how limits on executive powers protect the nation against tyranny, my Administrative Law professor briefly went silent, turned away from the class, and put a hand to her mouth. She turned back a few seconds later, cool and collected, and let out a quick exhale. “I’m sorry, folks, I got choked up there for a second. I didn’t think that would happen,” she said. This was the most direct acknowledgement from any professor that year of how ridiculous the ideology of modern legal education looks right now.

I genuinely do not blame my professors for not knowing what to do when everything they believed about their chosen profession proved, in a matter of months, to be a lie. It is a very extreme and upsetting situation. That being said, the legal profession, and especially the legal academy, simply cannot keep going like this. The contradictions have become too great. It is better for everyone if we dispense with them now, and have the courage to deal honestly with one another. 

There are plenty of people who have spent much more time thinking about the law than myself. But for whatever my opinion is worth: I think the power of the courts is, first and foremost, the power of legitimization. When a judge slams a gavel and declares something is true, it becomes capital-t True; unquestionable in the eyes of the state and its monopoly on violence. The Supreme Court declares what is True about the Constitution, which means it declares what is True about the core political structures of the United States, and by extension, about the American nation. 

For a brief window in the mid-20th century, the Court began to declare it was True that the American nation is a multiracial group of equals bound together through democracy. This was a historically contingent phenomenon tied to geopolitics, and it never accurately reflected American life. But it was an aspiration, and one which the Court’s decisions helped legitimize to the public.

It certainly became the official narrative to the legal profession, partly because it flattered young, liberal-leaning lawyers’ egos. But it also gestured toward a path in which democratic ideals and judicial supremacy could coexist. Drawing on the Reconstruction amendments and the Second Founding, the Warren Court’s Constitution was one that had always “promised” freedom, rights, and popular sovereignty to all, but just hadn’t quite achieved that promise yet. For the judiciary, this framework granted legitimate permission to override legislatures from time to time, as long as they did so in service of the ideal of popular self-governance. For the public, this rhetoric of a democratic “promise” meant that America didn’t have to choose between romanticizing its past and doing justice in its present.

But fully believing this “promise” is in the Constitution requires one to either ignore or disavow the original Constitution’s Framers. The problem is that their 1787 language is still a majority of the document’s text. The original Constitution quite clearly does not “promise” a multiracial democracy. The original Framers hated and feared democracy, and could have killed someone for agitating for a multiracial one. Far from intending inclusive, majoritarian governance, these men largely wrote the Constitution to make their financial property rights unassailable to legislatures following the public’s wishes. On this reading, the “original intent” of the Constitution is to prohibit the wishes of the many from affecting the business interests of the few.

The Reconstruction amendments, from which we get the modern Constitution’s best and most democratic impulses, were grafted onto core institutions with anti-majoritarian features intact from the Framing era. Most of these anti-majoritarian features survive to this day. The result, as the journalist Osita Nwanevu has documented with clearer eyes than most lawyers are capable of, is that for all of its admirable reforms up to this point, we still live under a Constitution designed to produce an aristocratic republic, not a democracy. And an aristocratic republic is, at best, what we live under now.

If one wants to imagine a single, unbroken American ideal from the founding through to today, then it would be convenient for that ideal to be an unfulfilled promise of multiracial, egalitarian democracy. But such a throughline is a mirage, and not a very robust way to think about history in the first place. More important is whether we want to live in the country the Founders sought to create — one which did unforgivable things, under their orders.

There is much that I want to change about American law. But the most important principle is that we simply should not care that the Framers did not want their new country to be a multiracial democracy. This country should be a multiracial democracy. Our judges should care about egalitarianism, mutual respect, compassion, and the popular will more than they care about whatever they imagine the Framers might have thought.

Making this a consistent and practicable legal principle requires major and long overdue Constitutional amendments. But at the very least, we ought to dispense with the fig leaf that so-called “original intent” is the only defensible way, or a remotely desirable way, to read the Constitution. As Nwanevu has argued, if there is a choice between sacralizing the Constitution and its Framers, and making America a just and decent place now, we should choose the latter.

Just as the Framers were not bound by the wishes of the crown, we are not bound by the wishes of the Framers. We might at least consider what the Founding Generation meant by their words. But we are not required to care.

For practical purposes, the current Roberts Court has killed the Warren Court’s Constitution dead. In its place, they have erected a revanchist Constitution: Jamelle Bouie argues that, although the Roberts Court’s only consistent principle is corruption, its opinions are effectively returning the U.S. to pre-Civil War federalism. Under this vision, the union is not a democracy at all. It is first and foremost a guarantee of property rights to the powerful, through the undisputed duty of states to enforce those rights.

It is often said that the Founding Generation was motivated by concern about tyranny. This is an admirable concern. While we should abandon what is dishonorable about the Founding Generation (of which there is quite a lot), we can certainly share their disdain for state force unconsented to. That is what the Court is now prescribing in the Founding Generation’s name.

One reason to look past the Framers is that opposition to tyranny does not necessarily imply support for democracy: there are many forms of government besides monarchy and democracy, such as the Framers’ aristocratic republicanism. That said, to achieve its dream of killing mid-century legal liberalism, the conservative movement had to abandon any pretense of sharing the Founders’ admirable concern about tyranny. If there is honor in the legal profession, then we should aid in the overthrow of tyrants, even if it means that certain old men with frilly robes and tiny hammers do not always like us very much.

My ultimate opinion about law school is that it was strange, but clarifying. May we all continue to learn, and take action.