The Supreme Court of Laziness

America’s apex constitutional court is in crisis, it has been for a while. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the current conservative majority has transformed a supposed constitutional umpire into one of America’s preeminent policymaking machines. With unrivalled control of the court, these six individuals have done what they like, bending and breaking the law as they see fit. As they reshape the law, they have also become increasingly lazy. Uninterested in engaging in serious legal arguments, they now regularly produce opinions that are disingenuous distortions of the legal reality before them. More than ever they also increasingly lean on unserious sources, and refuse to explain their legal workings out. In the 2024-2025 term, the conservative majority took this legal laziness to even greater heights, committing constitutional vandalism using sloppy arguments, disingenuous distortions of facts, and a host of completely unexplained orders.

For the record, this cohort of conservative justices have always been lazy arbiters of the legal order they oversee. Across two decades, the Roberts Court has indulged in a range of unserious arguments, allowing it to realign America’s constitutional order in dramatic fashion. In 2022, as he wrote legal abortion out of the constitution, Samuel Alito, a justice supposedly famed for his legal prowess, chose to cite, out of every source available to him, Matthew Hale. Hale, a man whose legal acumen centres on the 17th century witch trials, and was also a man who believed rape couldn’t happen in a marriage, is hardly an authoritative source. Including such citations signalled not only that the court hated women, but that it was ready to justify its conclusions by any means necessary. 

Conservatives, however, have never been quite this lazy. In its most recent term, the court has given up trying to engage in serious legal discussion, opting instead to randomly work its way backwards from the conclusions the majority wants to reach. This behaviour was visible across almost every aspect of the court and the work it produced. In cases from Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton to Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court incoherently and incorrectly mashed together excuses as to why it should let the law do things it shouldn’t. The most visible example of this legal sloppiness is undoubtedly United States v Skrmetti, a merits case which centres on a Tennessee law that bans transgender minors from accessing gender affirming care.

In Skrmetti, conservatives, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, try to convince anyone who has eyes and can read, that a Tennessee law, written specifically to block gender affirming care for minors who don’t align with their sex at birth, is not actually about sex. Eager to let the law survive concerns that the law discriminates on the basis of sex, Roberts makes the very unconvincing case that SB1 discriminates on the other characteristics also mentioned in the law, namely specific medical use. This argument, however, bends itself around the reality of the law and its function, ignoring that ‘specific medical use’ is still dependent on the sex of the minor. The law also explicitly tells everyone that minors should ‘appreciate’ the sex they are born into. As Justice Sotomayor points out in her dissent, Roberts is so eager to make the law look as if it is not discriminating on the basis of sex, he “refuses to call a spade a spade.”

At the same time Roberts refuses to acknowledge Tennessee’s law always turns on the characteristic of sex, he also lazily omits several discussions central to arguments in Skrmetti. For instance, Roberts doesn’t bother considering whether transgender individuals are a “suspect” or “quasi-suspect” class at all, or whether the Supreme Court’s very recent ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (a case that protects employees against discrimination on the basis of gender identity) has any bearing on this case. Omissions like these, where the court shrugs off major concerns in a few disinterested sentences, illustrates its increasingly lazy behaviour. 

Other conservatives, unsurprisingly, don’t do any better in Skrmetti. The conservative Clarence Thomas chooses, despite all the sources available to him, to cite New York Times opinion articles to argue against medical experts and their guidance. Thomas does this not once, not twice, but twelve times in concurrence. Meanwhile, Amy Coney Barrett chooses simply to ignore all available evidence, historic and recent (including the very law at issue within Skrmetti), of discrimination against transgender people, to argue they are not a class that faces rampant discrimination. Each of these unique distortions of reality again reveal just how unwilling the conservatives are to engage with the plain facts of the cases before them.

The laziness of the court is not just confined to its merits docket. In fact, when you turn to the court’s shadow docket, also known as the emergency docket, you gain a sense of just how pervasive the court’s legal laziness has become. This docket, a place where the court does most of its work today, is also a place where it undertakes some of its most brazen constitutional vandalism. Across the 113 cases on the emergency docket this term, most of which deal with issues around the separation of powers, the conservative majority left a trail of constitutional wreckage. Time and time again, the court used the docket to ignore huge constitutional issues and rule, procedurally, in the Trump administration's favour. This tactic again puts the cart before the horse, intervening to let things that are wildly unconstitutional occur, until they work their way back to the court.

This was the case in countless decisions such as Trump v. CASA, Trump v. Wilcox, and McMahon v. New York. In each of these cases the conservative majority essentially allowed Trump's constitutional vandalism to stand under the argument that the court was merely reviewing the procedural aspects of each case, rather than its constitutionality. In Trump v. CASA this allowed the majority to remove a nationwide injunction on Trump’s executive order that erases birthright citizenship from the constitution. In Trump v. Wilcox, it allowed the court to stay an order that reinstated two individuals who Trump fired (unconstitutionally), at least until the court returns to the actual facts of the case. The same was true of McMahon v. New York, in which the majority allowed Trump to dismantle the department of education. Each of these orders, permitting brazenly unconstitutional actions, are at best extremely lazy, inflicting untold damage to America’s constitutional order.

This behaviour is made all the more damaging by the fact that the conservative majority failed, over and over, to show any kind of justification for these orders. In no fewer than seven judgments, the court overturned lower court orders and injunctions against Trump and his administration in orders that were completely unexplained. Consequential decisions made by the court, like the ones involving the removal of individuals to countries they have no connection to and the erasure of entire federal agencies, were delivered to America, and the courts that must interpret them, without so much as a single explanatory paragraph.

This behaviour, tantamount to saying ‘because we said so’, would not pass muster in a college essay, let alone in some of the most consequential legal orders emerging from America’s top constitutional court. The court has a duty, especially to lower courts which are bound by these orders, to lay out the reasoning behind its demands. This is especially important with regards to cases such as Trump v. Wilcox. In Wilcox, the conservative majority, having heard no briefing or evidence, throws Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and its long settled interpretation of executive power under the bus. Wilcox does all this in just a handful of disingenuous paragraphs covering a mere two pages. As Justice Kagan stated in a detailed eight page dissent, this behaviour, essentially shifting precedent via the backdoor without explanation, is “nothing short of extraordinary”.

Having used its legal laziness as a pretence to shred rights and the constitution further this term, the Supreme Court is set to weaponise its laziness even further. Over the course of its next term, ruling on some of its favourite topics, the court is likely to bring about the death of the voting rights act with Louisiana v. Callais, and open the floodgates to even more money in politics using National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission to overturn one of the few remaining restrictions on campaign spending. More worryingly, currently sat in the courts cert. pool (the courts case review and selection stage) is a case which could revisit Obergerfell v. Hodges, the landmark case which found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. While it remains to be seen whether there are even enough votes to push this case past the cert. pool, the court with its current majority hellbent on reorganising the constitutional order in their conservative image, leaves this question down but certainly not out.

Illustrations by Will Allen/Europinion