Open-Minded Discourse and the Chief Justice's Role: Two SCOTUSblog Takes

Two new essays on SCOTUSblog take up separate questions about how the Supreme Court operates. The first looks back to Marbury v. Madison and the Court's long-standing power of judicial review, drawing lessons about the value of open-minded discourse among the justices. It treats reasoned exchange as central to the Court's legitimacy, though it does not propose any specific reform.

The second essay, by law professor Josh Blackman, is more concrete. Blackman suggests that the chief justice should hand off two traditional roles—presiding at oral argument and assigning opinions when in the majority—to other members of the Court. He argues that "sometimes old traditions run their course," implying that the chief justice's accumulated duties may have become too much for one person.

The two pieces are not in conversation with each other. One is about the quality of deliberation; the other is about the allocation of administrative power. They agree only in treating the Court's internal conventions as worthy of scrutiny, and neither addresses the other's argument directly.