Dear Jurisprudence: Why Don’t Voters Care About the Dang Courts?

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This week’s episode of Amicus is a mailbag special in which Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer listeners’ burning questions about the law and its odds of surviving a second Trump administration. Amicus listeners have a lot of smart questions, so we’re starting a new occasional “Dear Prudence” series where we share your questions, and Mark and Dahlia’s answers. There’s this enduring sense that the court gets covered as though it is European soccer, or as though it is something that is happening in Rome where we read the entrails and then we write about them for two weeks in June, while failing week after week, year after year, election after election, to give folks any sense of what the court actually does, and how that, in turn, connects to their lives as they’re lived, and how all that in turn connects to how we vote and think about democracy. We’ve thought a lot about the ways in which we have often covered the court in a fashion that disserves the mission that you are setting forth, and we think a lot about this in the context of state supreme courts and state attorneys general, and lower federal courts, and the entire judicial system, that just gets covered as though it’s a Shakespeare play.