On this week’s episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, we are joined by New York University Law School Professor Barry Friedman, an expert on the Supreme Court and public opinion, discusses the current Supreme Court. According to the Pew Research Center, “Americans’ ratings of the Supreme Court are now as negative as – and more politically polarized than – at any point in more than three decades of polling on the nation’s highest court.” (See Views of Supreme Court Far Less Positive After Abortion Ruling Reversing Roe v. Wade | Pew Research Center.)
Professor Friedman puts this research in historical context, noting that the public’s view of the Court has waxed and waned over time. During the New Deal, for example, the public’s view of the Court declined during its clash with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930s. Professor Friedman explains why he believes the situation with the Court today may be different from dips in public opinion in prior eras. He suggests that this may be due, in part, to the erosion of political checks on the Court that previously were stronger. Along the way, Professor Friedman and Associate Dean Rodger Citron discuss a number of the current justices and some of the most important cases of the Court’s 2021-22 term.
Brought to you by the Touro Law Review.
Our guest today is Professor Barry Friedman.
Professor Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of Politics at New York University School of law. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (2009) and the widely-discussed book on policing and the Constitution, Unwarranted: Policing without Permission, (2017). He also is a co-author of Judicial Decisionmaking (2020), a textbook that that marries social science about judging with normative and institutional legal questions.
Professor Friedman writes extensively about police regulation, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction, and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation’s top law and peer-edited reviews, and he is a frequent contributor to the nation’s leading publications, including The New York Times, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Politico and The New Republic, among others.
Professor Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago and received his law degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and also worked as a litigation associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Washington D.C. before becoming a law professor.
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