The Supreme Court's Pattern of Refusing Deference to Other Legal Actors Undermines Democratic Constitutionalism
Source: Alexis Romero. "Will the Supreme Court actually listen to Ketanji Brown Jackson on her big expertise?." October 18, 2026. slate.com
The Gist
The author argues that the Supreme Court keeps rejecting the expertise of other legal bodies, like the Sentencing Commission, and treats its own opinion as the only one that counts. In the Beaird sentencing case, this could lead to inconsistent prison terms and thousands of resentencings. The author concludes that a court that ignores other institutions will also ignore the public.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court is engaged in a troubling trend of insisting that its own legal views are the only ones that matter, as shown in Beaird v. United States, and this trend harms the movement for a more democratic legal system because a court that won't listen to other legal institutions will likely ignore the views of the people.
Premises
- In Beaird, Gorsuch signaled he would follow the Loper Bright approach and rule that courts need not defer to the Sentencing Commission's commentary at all, leaving judges free to impose their own interpretations.
- The Sentencing Commission is an expert body created by Congress to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities, and its guidelines and commentary are inextricably linked, written by the same officials and refined through years of sentencing data.
- Allowing judges to ignore the commentary at will would weaken both the commentary and guidelines, producing wildly inconsistent sentences for the same crimes, with the most vulnerable Americans harmed most, and potentially sending around 10,000 cases back for resentencing.
- Loper Bright already shifted power from expert agencies to courts by requiring judges to find the 'best' answer to expertise-laden questions, going further than even very conservative justices of past decades would have.
- Beaird is one of a series of 'judicial respect' cases in which the Court decides how much weight to give Congress, expert agencies, or state actors, and the Court has repeatedly chosen to give them little.
Assumptions
- Judicial deference to expert agencies is generally preferable to courts substituting their own judgment on technical questions.
- The Court's majority behaves consistently across these cases and is motivated by a drive to monopolize legal interpretation rather than by good-faith legal reasoning.
- Declining to defer to agencies and Congress is meaningfully analogous to declining to heed the views of the people.
- Sentencing uniformity is a paramount value and non-deference will in fact reduce uniformity.
- Gorsuch's questioning at oral argument reliably predicts the Court's eventual ruling.
- Popular constitutionalism and a more democratic legal system are desirable goals that agency deference helps advance.