Brennan Center for Justice reposted this
We formed the Historians Council on the Constitution at Brennan Center for Justice to respond to the Supreme Court’s increased use of faulty history to decide major questions of constitutional law. The idea was simple: Historians and lawyers would team up to challenge efforts to rewrite our constitutional rights by rewriting our history. The Supreme Court’s last batch of cases from late June reflects the Council at work—helping steer the Court away from some truly damaging outcomes and, in places where even the best briefing couldn’t do that, helping bolster strong dissents. In Trump v. Barbara, both Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion preserving the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and Justice Jackson’s concurrence drew extensively on arguments and sources from an amicus brief filed by Council member Kate Masur (Northwestern) and her co-author Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins). In Trump v. Cook, Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion keeping the Federal Reserve’s Lisa Cook in office closely tracks the analysis and citations from an amicus filing by Council member Jane Manners (Fordham). And Justice Sotomayor’s detailed critique of Chief Justice Roberts’ (grievous) majority opinion in Slaughter v. Trump draws on filings and scholarship from Council members Jonathan Gienapp, Jane Manners, and Noah Rosenblum. We’re grateful for all the work our historian partners have invested and for our pro bono partners at Friedman Kaplan Seiler Adelman & Robbins LLP, Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, and Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP for supporting them and our bigger project. For more on the Historians Council—including the filings mentioned here—visit our webpage: https://lnkd.in/ezQagtTN. And for more on the Brennan Center’s work countering originalism, take a look at my team’s latest guide for litigators: https://lnkd.in/g5J8nv32.