People may disagree with individual Supreme Court decisions, but most accept — in fact, they probably take for granted — that the Court is the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning. That perception is misguided, and the results of ceding interpretation of the Constitution to nine justices have been disastrous, leading to a Supreme Court that “has played a starring role in the unraveling of our democracy,” argue Harvard Law School professors Nikolas Bowie ’14 and Daphna Renan. In their book “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People,” they trace the history of a Court that has come to be associated with what they call “judicial supremacy” and promote an alternative course that they assert would better reflect the founders’ vision of a country governed in the name of “We the People.”
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