The Supreme Court is a poorly understood element of the United States’ political economy, one lacking obvious parallels in historical studies of the capitalist state. To judge from contemporary left, liberal, and even centrist critiques, the shadow it casts on political life flows solely from the “substantive” effects of its specific decisions, insofar as they often block redistributive policies supported by popular majorities.¹ The frequency of such minoritarian decisions has ticked up with the crystallization of a six-justice Republican supermajority in the wake of Amy Coney Barrett’s October 2020 confirmation. After Barrett’s apotheosis, the court has also reliably sided not just with the political right writ large but with the most zealously deregulatory, religiously conservative, and inegalitarian fragments of the Republican coalition. In decisions on abortion, race relations, gender medicine, and the preemptive rights of evangelical churches to discriminate, the justices not only take sides in contemporary culture wars but do so in legibly partisan terms. Since January 2025, moreover, the conservative supermajority has embraced the Donald Trump administration’s invitation at least twenty-one times to freeze or reverse lower-court injunctions against deportations, mass firings of federal employees, the expulsion of trans people from the military, and sudden withdrawals of federal funding for state schools and foreign aid. Combined with a July 2024 decision creating presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, these judicial interventions suggest a body that does not intend to narrow the options of a co-partisan president, at least absent a division within his own coalition. In striking contrast, the court repeatedly took a punitive pose against Joe Biden–era moves on student debt, workplace accommodations, and climate change; all were invalidated in peacocking displays of shouty self-righteousness.

How, then, to diagnose this behavior? Leading voices in the ongoing court reform debate frame the problem in terms of the bench’s composition and conduct and their effect on substantive outcomes. Ergo, remedial measures narrowly restrict themselves to the bench’s composition and conduct. On this widely held view, the courts must be fixed by some combination of new ethics rules, mandatory term limits, additional judgeships to engender balance, or tighter controls on judges’ choices in picking and resolving cases. The problem is conceptualized in almost mechanical terms: fix the bench, and the outputs will revert to a desirable status quo ante. In its febrile and emasculated twilight, even the Biden administration reached a like conclusion when it belatedly backed term limits. The contrast with its earlier resistance to serious debate on court reform — sidelined through the creation of a predictably useless commission in an act of culpable political malpractice — was striking.

More sophisticated advocates, though, contrast a surfeit of judicial power with the emasculation of democratic bodies. They call for a general recalibration in favor of democratic institutions beyond just quick fixes to the courts.² But even this framing disengages the court from a wider, more dynamic political economy, suppressing its precise entanglement in larger elite projects. None of these approaches, moreover, leave space to connect with a rich yet neglected left tradition on the uses of judicial power within a capitalist state. For while Karl Marx said famously little about the law, beyond locating it in the superstructure rather than the base, subsequent theorists have grappled with the paradoxes of Soviet legality and the hypocrisy of Cold War liberal legalism, and so started to fill the gaps.