Document Type
Article
Abstract
Court watchers read each Supreme Court term like tea leaves, seeking in the record a deeper meaning about who we are and where we are going. To read the recent term, this Essay takes up Oliver Wendell Holmes’s image of law as a tapestry woven for its initiates and Robert Cover’s account of courts as jurispathic, killing competing legal meanings to preserve a coherent archive. It sees the 2025–26 term not as a set of doctrinal developments or even political compromises, but as a weave of foreclosed claims, in which what the discerning eye can read is those foreclosures, those deaths, the Court bothered to explain. Through the term’s decisions on asylum, guns, citizenship, and executive power, it argues that as a matter of narrative and culture, reasoning now flows laterally, to fellow powerholders, rather than downward to the governed. To be reasoned with, the Essay contends, is a question of membership; the weave records who the law is, and is not, for.
Recommended Citation
Abigail Stepnitz, Her Discerning Eye, 18 ConLawNOW 131 (2026)