lookhigh:

The Supreme Court, under construction

On Monday’s Fresh Air, Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, provides a roundup of the past year’s most important Supreme Court decisions — including ones addressing healthcare reform, immigration law, campaign finance rules, the access of Guantanamo detainees to the courts, and the rights of criminal defendants while plea bargaining.

I do think John Roberts takes himself very seriously and he should, as the custodian of the prestige and legitimacy of the branch of government that he heads. How much that entered his calculations in [the healthcare case], only he knows. But it’s a perfectly appropriate consideration to make sure your branch, which is meant to be disinterested and apolitical and judicial, should not be perceived as yet a third political branch of government. And in the wake of ideological 5-4 decisions like Bush v. Gore and Citizens United, the Court has let itself open to that interpretation and had it struck down the healthcare law 5-4 along ideological lines, there would have been some substantial attack on the credibility of the Court.

— Adam Liptak on Chief Justice Robert’s legacy

I knew it was a confusing decision because my phone started ringing and lawyers for both sides were completely convinced that they had won the case. … the court’s decision was ambiguous enough that you couldn’t even tell which side had won.

— New York Times reporter Adam Liptak on the ambiguous and vague decision handed down by the Supreme Court in March 2010 on mutual-fund advisers’ fees. The decision was unanimous but vague enough that both sides declared victory.

New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak on the conservative nature of John Roberts’ Court: “The Burger court and the Rehnquist court, which sat for about 35 years, fairly consistently were ruling in a conservative direction about 55 percent of the time. That was a very, very sharp turn to the right from the Warren court, the famously liberal court that preceded it, which was at 34 percent [conservative]. And the Roberts court, which has now finished five years, now moves an additional increment to the right. It’s now at 58 percent — I stress, not a huge move, but a discernable move in a period where there was nothing like this. And the term that ended last year, the court is at 65 percent conservative. So you do see by these measurements, the court is noticeably more conservative than even the conservative courts that preceded it.”

Tomorrow: We talk about the Roberts court with New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak. He’s recently written about how the Roberts court has become the most conservative one in living memory, and that several of the court’s written decisions have been unusually long, but lacking in clarity.