A stalled economic recovery. The airwaves filled with demagoguery about important constitutional issues. A president who chides the Supreme Court for striking down a major piece of federal reform legislation. And, in response to charges of a pro-corporate tilt on a Court with a narrow conservative majority, Justice Roberts defends the Court’s intervention with the bland claim that judges do nothing more than “lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged” in order “to decide whether the latter squares with the former.”

2010? 1936. That mechanistic image of the judicial process was the handiwork of Justice Owen Roberts, responding to critics who complained that the Court was overriding New Deal economic legislation on the basis of its own political preferences. To read Professor Karlan’s full column, go to http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/karlan.php