THE ORIGIN PIECE
This project was inspired by a piece I wrote titled “When Pop Culture Critiques: How American TV and Film Examines the Links Between Politics, Justice, and the Judiciary's Legitimacy.” The entire paper can be found here. The class was was formally known as “Investigating the Law: American Legal Writing,” so throughout the year we tore apart judicial opinions, read papers on the judiciary, and watched film about the American court system. This paper was inspired my three things we watched: an episode of Boston Legal, the documentary Reversing Roe, and an episode of Law & Order. As I viewed these shows, I was fascinated by how each offered its own critique of the American court system. Boston Legal tore apart the Supreme Court for being too political, Reversing Roe explored how the court became deeply emerged in a partisan issue, and Boston Legal examined how political extremists can warp the court system.
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In my paper, I argued that politicization of the court decreases its legitimacy. The judiciary is unique because, as Alexander Hamilton famously put it, “The judiciary [...] has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society [...] It may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” In other words, the power of the court lies in how it is percieved by society. It must apply the law in a nonpartisan, responsible manner so the people respect its decisions. How society perceives the court is affected by pop culture, and what pop culture says about the court is affected by how society perceives the court, in a never-ending cycle. To prove my point, therefore, I used examples from the three aforementioned films, finding examples that demonstrated the politicization of the court is a bad thing.
THE TWEETS
Twitter, to me, is a fascinating place of public discourse. Twitter gets bashed, and rightly so, for its users oft provocative, one-dimensional stances. One of my favorite takes on online discourse—not a perfect take, but one certainly worth reading—is from Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She decried people who have an “unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others” and whose “passionate performance of virtue is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.” Adichie did a great job of capturing how Twitter users attack other people and rage about the world's problems all from the safety of a screen.
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The following are tweets about Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, two women nominated to the Supreme Court within two years of eachother. I find the tweets stunning: the exact people that support Amy Coney Barrett, a judicial conservative, abhor Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has a more progressive philosophy. This isn't surprising since the two women were nominated by presidents from different political parties. Yet, the Supreme Court is supposed to be a branch aloof from politics, and these tweets show that is far from the case.
These are only a subset of Tweets about the women, and only a subset of Tweets about the judiciary in general, but they do a good job of capturing how partisanship can spread on social media as people critique the judiciary. What's most startling to me is that many of these come from official political parties, the Democratic and the Republican Parties. It feels wrong that politics are so obviously inserted into the judiciary.
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