Despite nearly identical backgrounds and conservative credentials, Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are jurisprudentially diverging. Kavanaugh has become a key institutionalist aligning with the majority, while Gorsuch is often an outlier, demonstrating that personal history is a poor predictor of a justice's judicial philosophy on the court.
Large Language Models are poor at predicting Supreme Court outcomes because they are trained on media coverage that increasingly and incorrectly portrays the court as a purely political body. The AI reflects our own biased assumption that every case is decided along a 6-3 ideological split, which is a rare outcome.
The McGirt decision, which affirmed vast tribal reservations in Oklahoma, wasn't a radical reinterpretation of the law. Its radicalness lay in the Court's simple act of holding the U.S. government to promises made in treaties, a rare occurrence in a history where greed, not justice, typically dictates outcomes in tribal law.
The legal doctrines created to dispossess Native Americans are not a historical relic. They form a foundational, often overlooked, part of American law used to justify exercising power over other groups at the "margins of empire," including migrants and terror suspects, without granting them constitutional protections.
Contrary to the narrative of an ideologically rigid conservative Supreme Court, it is now reviewing and reversing cases from the highly conservative Fifth Circuit court more than any other. This data suggests a more nuanced, institutionalist dynamic at play rather than a simple partisan agenda.
Historically, presidents who clash with the Supreme Court—from Jefferson to Jackson—have paradoxically enhanced its power. By creating a political foil, these conflicts allow the Court to assert its independence and solidify its role as a vital check on executive power, a dynamic potentially repeating with Trump.