The Supreme Court Landmark Decisions Tier List

Or, Alternatively, the Warren Court Glaze Session

(Credit for this article and voiceover goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Hello everyone! Samuel Lipson here. For the past six months or so, I’ve been the oh-so-animated voice you hear if you press the play button at the top of Josh’s articles, or you may have also seen me yapping in this newsletter’s chat about the woes of being a leftist living in Florida. What you might not know about me is that I moonlight as a case law buff, with a particular focus on the Supreme Court. The last few years have done a lot to bring the justices down from their ivory tower and demonstrate how nakedly ideological (and in some cases, openly corrupt) the conservative majority is. Part of this is due to the absurd level of polarization that permeates national politics in the Trump era. Prior to Trump’s appointments to the bench, only 4 confirmation votes in the last 120 years had been decided by a margin of fewer than 10 Senators (one of them, of course, being Harlan Crow’s lapdog, Clarence Thomas). Since then, all of them have been furthering what the mainstream media has come to call a crisis of judicial legitimacy.

However, anyone on the left with a passing familiarity in Supreme Court history knows that the Court has been a political vehicle for decades, both for good and for ill. To that end, I’d like to build out a tier list reviewing some of the most consequential Supreme Court landmark decisions from a leftist lens and offer thoughts on how beneficial or harmful some of the most notable opinions have been. I will rate cases based on a mixture of the quality of the case’s holding as a matter of legal reasoning and its cascading impacts on society. Entries are unordered within their tiers, and I’m generally skipping stuff prior to 1900, as well as cases which are no longer effective law. I promise I didn’t forget about McCulloch v. Maryland, but we have reached a point in history where landmarks that old are less judicial precedent and more truisms of American law. At least, that’s what they should be, but more on that later.

I want this to be a living list, both because new cases are always coming and because I can’t possibly write about all of the dozens of landmark cases out of the gate. If you have cases of your own you’d like me to review, leave a comment below! One more thing I probably ought to say before we start: I am not a lawyer, and my opinions should not be interpreted as legal advice or anything remotely approaching it.

To begin, let’s address some of the most abhorrent affronts the Court has brought to bear against the political process, the legal profession, and basic human decency.

Hell Tier:

Korematsu v. United States

Sand Island Internment Camp c. 1942 in Honolulu, credit US Army Signal Corps

While many of us on the left consider Franklin Roosevelt to be one of, if not the best president the United States has ever had, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the darkest stains on his, and the court’s legacy. Back in 1942, in response to mounting anti-Japanese racism (including his own) following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, allowing the Secretary of War and his designees to declare virtually anywhere in the country as a “military area” whereby they had complete authority over who was allowed to reside there. Lieutenant General John DeWitt and others wasted little time in making the entire West Coast an exclusionary zone and forcibly relocating over 100,000 people, the vast majority of whom were American citizens. The relocation camps could be charitably called slums and more accurately described as concentration camps. Fred Korematsu was one of many who resisted arrest, and his conviction was appealed up to the Supreme Court.

In an absolutely ridiculous opinion which explicitly denies its own very obvious racism, Justice Hugo Black (himself a former Klan member) claimed that “exclusion from a threatened area…has a definite and close relationship to the prevention of espionage and sabotage.” Consequently, the executive order was affirmed as constitutional. One small, teeny, tiny problem, however: these areas weren’t under any fucking threat! How do I know this? As uncovered by journalists in the 1980s and affirmed by acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal in 2011, Charles Fahy, the Solicitor General who prosecuted the case, knowingly and purposely blocked the admission of evidence from the Office of Naval Intelligence that suggested Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not pose a threat to national security. Tens of thousands of innocent people were deprived of their lives and homes, with many even dying, all to sate the war-charged racism of the American populace. Anyone wishing to deny the existence of systemic racism in this country needs a summary of this case and its effects nailed to their door like the 95 Theses.

Gregg v. Georgia

Those who know me know that the death penalty is something I find to be an absolute disgrace, so the Supreme Court case declaring it as not inherently unconstitutional is going straight into the pits, especially because it put an end to the nationwide suspension of the death penalty imposed four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Put simply, the notion that the death penalty does not inherently fulfill the standard of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by Amendment VIII is patently ridiculous for any number of moral reasons. However, I’m going to set all of those aside, and instead present you with a paraphrased version of an anti-death penalty argument from leftist content creator Shaun that first convinced me that it should be banned wholesale.

If we make the reasonable assumption that the United States has an imperfect justice system, that means that, over a long enough period of time, there will be a minimum of one innocent person executed in a legal system that allows the death penalty. Therefore, no rational pro- argument can contend that there is no chance of systemic abuse or error; instead, it must argue that the killing of the occasional innocent is outweighed by the benefits of having the death penalty. I have yet to see a convincing argument in favor of the death penalty that makes this necessary concession, and we indeed know that innocents are at the very least regularly convicted, if not executed; according to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least 200 convicts have been exonerated prior to execution in the last 50 years. Would you like to bet that every innocent was accounted for?

In the years since this case, usage of the death penalty has been admittedly limited, with it being banned in 23 states and often restricted only to especially heinous homicides in many others. However, until the number of death row inmates is and forevermore remains zero, Gregg v. Georgia will stand as solid proof of the disregard for human life exhibited at the highest echelons of power.

Bush v. Gore