Supreme Court

The Court may be the non-political branch, but its members are cognizant, of course, of their having neither sword nor purse but merely judgment, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 78. Yet judgment has a force all its own, to influence and change the climate of ideas, which in time constrains the political forces that brought us Leviathan, forces that in turn and in the end must free us from those shackles. In short, the Court cannot roll back Leviathan on its own, but it can put a brake on it and, by controlling its docket, chip away at its substance, all the while laying the intellectual and legal foundations for a revival of liberty through limited constitutional government. We at Cato encourage movement along those lines.