SWLAW Blog | Events
April 16, 2025
Stephen Vladeck Delivers 2025 Montgomery Lecture on Supreme Court Power and Accountability
Georgetown Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck delivered Southwestern Law School’s 2025 Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Lecture on March 24, 2025, where he built a case that the U.S. Supreme Court has never been more powerful—or more unaccountable.
“This is a Court that’s spending a finite amount of institutional capital, and it’s running out,” Vladeck said.
Framing his remarks around “the Court we have, the Court we had, and the Court we need,” Vladeck demonstrated how the Court has gradually cut itself off from the systems that once held it accountable.
One result, he said, is the rise of the “shadow docket,” a term he helped popularize. Today’s Court hears fewer cases than at any point since 1864 but increasingly issues emergency rulings with major consequences. “Greenlighting executions, blocking immigration policy, reshaping election rules, without full briefing, without oral argument, often without explanation.”
“We should be invested in bolstering the Court as an institution—so it can actually serve its role in our constitutional system.”
That lack of transparency, he warned, is undermining public trust. He characterized the current Supreme Court as “a Court that’s doing less and less because of all the power it has accumulated, because it does what it wants,” he said.
He pointed to the Court’s near-total control over its own process as both a symptom and a source of that power. “There’s no mandatory jurisdiction for the Supreme Court anymore,” he said. “They decide what they want to decide, when they want to decide it, how they want to decide it, and how much they want to tell us.” That discretion, he argued, allows the justices to take high-stakes cases, issue rulings with little explanation, and shield themselves from meaningful public scrutiny.
But the Court wasn’t always this isolated. Vladeck described how Congress once managed the Court’s size, schedule, and budget, and even threatened to revoke pensions to encourage retirement. “Dear Ward Hunt,” he said, paraphrasing an actual proclamation. “We would like you to get off the Court. Love, Congress.”
“It’s not that earlier justices were saints or geniuses,” he added. “It’s that they didn’t think they were on an island.”
Restoring that accountability, he explained, doesn’t require radical reform. Congress still holds tools it once used, sometimes aggressively, to influence the Court’s behavior, from budget control to jurisdictional threats. While not all of those tactics would be appropriate today, Vladeck argued they reflect a tradition of meaningful oversight that has largely disappeared and needs to be revived in some form.
He also called for a shift in how the public talks about the Court. “Talk about the Court not just ideologically, but institutionally,” he said. “We should be invested in bolstering the Court as an institution so it can actually serve its role in our constitutional system.”
Despite his critique, Vladeck struck a hopeful note. The Court’s recent adoption of a formal ethics code may be toothless, he said, but it happened. “That was because people cared. Because public pressure still works.”
He concluded by noting that legitimacy can be restored—not by weakening the Court, but by rebuilding the systems that keep its power in check. “The Court we need,” he said, “is one that doesn’t just wield power, but earns the public’s trust.”