The Single Best Guide I've Heard to the Supreme Court's Rightward Shift
About this episode
Klein interviews law professor Kate Shaw for a guide to the Supreme Court's sharp right turn. They walk through the major decisions of the 2021-22 term — including Dobbs — and explain the conservative legal movement's decades-long project to capture the courts. Shaw clarifies originalism and textualism, how the shadow docket expanded the Court's power, and why the justices' claims of apolitical judging ring hollow. The conversation also confronts the Court's legitimacy crisis: plunging public trust, ethics questions, and whether structural reform is needed. Shaw's analysis is precise and unsparing — the Court, she argues, is now the most powerful and least accountable driver of American policy.