The University of Pittsburgh School of Law presents Constitution Day 2026

The Court We Need: What’s Really Wrong with the Supreme Court—and How to Fix It Featuring Stephen I. Vladeck, Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown University Law Center Stephen I. Vladeck is one of the nation's leading scholars on the U.S. Supreme Court, constitutional law, and the federal courts. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Shadow Docket, and a frequent legal analyst for CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other national media outlets. His scholarship has been cited by courts across the country, including the Supreme Court. For most of American history, the Supreme Court's authority rested not on its independence as such but on a broad, diffuse public trust that it was exercising that independence responsibly — a trust sustained by a continuous, often unglamorous dialogue with Congress over the Court's size, its calendar, its budget, and above all its docket. That dialogue has gone silent. This lecture argues that the resulting crisis is not that the Court has too much power but that it answers to no one for how it uses it, and that the remedy is neither Court-packing nor jurisdiction-stripping but the patient restoration of interbranch accountability-because a Court that Americans across the spectrum believe is behaving responsibly is also the only Court strong enough to stop a president who has decided not to listen.