How the American people can reclaim the Constitution—and the law—from this monarchical Supreme Court.

It has often occurred to me that if you were a visiting alien—or even, say, a visiting Norwegian—it might strike you as profoundly odd that many, if not most, Americans now mark the close of the Supreme Court term in the last two weeks of June by feeling abject horror that an unelected, life-tenured juristocracy has yet again made it harder to be a free, equal, and independent American. And then that same country immediately turns around on July Fourth and fetes itself as the best, freest democracy in the world.

The Supreme Court as currently constituted is the United States’ abusive boyfriend, constantly asserting the power to control every aspect of our lives while ignoring the actual rules governing its own conduct. If this court were your partner, making it forever more difficult to express your own preferences as it persistently intoned that it’s you that was the problem, you would pack a go bag and find a motel room.

And yet we stay. We wait for more. And with every term, that same Roberts Six ensures that the legislative branches have less power to make law, that lower courts have less authority to review presidential actions, and that all of the people have less access to the ballot box. The ratchet works in one direction: away from representative constitutional democracy.

For years, we have ended the Supreme Court term with our Slate readers and Amicus listeners imploring us: “But what can we do?” In this year’s special end-of-term series, we endeavor to answer that question. Our reply builds on the ideas we have tried to capture in our prior series on how to better cover the court, as well as how to think about the methodology of originalism: What can’t you do? You are not a spectator to American democracy, and you are not a passive recipient of American constitutional meaning.

This series was born of decades of watching a Supreme Court that answers to nobody expand its own power. It is born of an American public that in 2026 lives with less liberty and justice for all than the generation that came before. It is born of watching a nation of immigrants judicially reverse-engineered into a nation of xenophobes. It is born of watching the project to expand the franchise to more voters morph into the means of throttling it. It is born of acknowledging an American public that overwhelmingly hates mass school shootings and big money in politics, and women bleeding out from miscarriages, and roving ICE raids, but must remain somehow forever trapped in these very horrors because we share the inexorable sense that if the Supreme Court does it, it’s not illegal.

This series is a gesture and a hope: What would it look like if the court worked for you? What would it feel like if the court took seriously the idea that the American public can foment and lobby and birth constitutional meaning in their own home kitchens? What would it require for an American public to simply reject the reflexive grant of authority to a court slowly entrenching the creeping authoritarianism of blanket immunity for a president, the shrinking of the franchise, or the rampant lawlessness of terminating the regulatory state? If you could imagine—for a second—that the justices weren’t the last word on what is lawful, what wouldn’t you do to make it so? Read Dahlia Lithwick’s full essay here.