President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court justices after addressing a joint session of Congress, March 4, 2025. Image via Screengrab / PBS.
Fed up with the Trump administration's attempts to twist and rewrite rules for its own benefit, judges have become increasingly outspoken in their fight to preserve the rule of law, but according to a new report from the New York Times, some are "quietly" expressing worries about the "risks" involved in speaking up.
As the Tuesday report noted, "Judges are turning up the volume" in their rulings against President Donald Trump and his political machinations, abandoning their traditional "restrained style" in favor of language that conveys the gravity of the threat at hand. The Times called it "an emotive, populist approach," one that better allows them to give "full vent to the intensity of their concerns about cases flooding their dockets since President Trump returned to office."
"One compared her district’s ballooning caseload to a demigod’s battle against a mythological monster," the Times detailed. "Another sought to buttress his argument against National Guard deployments to U.S. cities with a YouTube link to a 1970 protest song. A third compared the Trump administration’s rewriting of American history to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel '1984.'"
Speaking with the Times about the trend, judges and other legal experts said that this sort of fiery, impassioned approach "has been helpful in underscoring judges’ belief in the urgency of the courts’ role as a check on Mr. Trump’s expansive interpretation of presidential power." On the flipside, however, some of those same sources "have worried that the heated rhetoric may also come with risks." For one thing, there is a concern that this approach could lead some in the public to suspect that the rulings from certain judges are "motivated by political animus, instead of the basic application of law to the facts of a case."
Others also expressed concern that the frequency with which judges are employing this sort of language might end up doing the opposite of underscoring the severity of Trump's misdeeds.
“The risk is being the boy who cried wolf,” Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of a book about Supreme Court nominees, explained to the Times. “If you say that the republic is collapsing in every single case, will anyone listen when the republic really is collapsing, and the Supreme Court says so?”
Marin K. Levy, a professor at Duke Law School, acknowledged that this could be an issue, but added that it should not deter judges from speaking up.
“If you’re repeatedly engaging in alarm-sounding, the force of that alarm is going to be diminished over time,” she said. “But just because there have been several fires doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t sound the alarm for the next one.”