Under Chief Justice John Roberts’ leadership, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices have delivered landmark victories for corporate and right-wing interests in dozens of cases, such as Citizens United v. FEC, Shelby County v. Holder, and Janus v. AFSCME. The conservative justices on the court decide cases as though they have been effectively captured by these special interests—a problem exacerbated by a broken nominations process that is resulting in increasingly more extreme partisans being put on the bench.
Join the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society (ACS) for a discussion of Supreme Court capture and what can be done to combat it, featuring leading policy experts and a keynote by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), author of the book Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy and the recently published ACS issue brief “A Right-Wing Rout: What the ‘Roberts Five’ Decisions Tell Us About the Integrity of Today’s Supreme Court.”
Introductory remarks | 11:30 a.m. – 11:35 a.m.
Neera Tanden, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress
Fixing a broken court | 11:35 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
How right-wing special interests captured the courts and what we can do to fix them
Panelists:
Anna Chu, Vice President for Strategy and Policy, National Women’s Law Center
Caroline Fredrickson, President, American Constitution Society; author of The Democracy Fix
Kristine Lucius, Executive Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs, Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights
Robert Raben, President and Founder, The Raben Group
Moderator:
Sam Berger, Vice President of Democracy and Government Reform, Center for American Progress
Keynote remarks | 12:30 p.m.–1:00 p.m.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Reckoning with a captured court | 1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
The cases decided by the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc and where they are headed
Panelists:
Sharon Block, Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School
Kent Greenfield, Professor and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Boston College Law School
Deepak Gupta, Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler PLLC
Ezra Rosenberg, Co-Director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Rena Steinzor , Edward M. Robertson Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law
Moderator:
Mark Joseph Stern, Writer, Slate