BU Law Annual Distinguished Lecture “Fixing the Supreme Court Through Its Docket”

Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Avenue
Barristers Hall, First Floor
12:45 pm – 2:00pm

Please join us on January 30th for the Boston University School of Law Annual Distinguished Lecture featuring Stephen Vladeck, Georgetown Law.

Most discussions of Supreme Court reform tend to focus on its personnel—whether through calls to expand the Court; to impose term limits on the current justices; to create externally enforceable ethics rules; or some combination of the three. Such proposals tend to run into two separate problems: as a practical matter, they face insurmountable political obstacles. And as a more theoretical matter, they don’t get at what’s actually wrong with today’s Supreme Court, at least in contrast to its predecessors.

Instead, a much better lens through which to understand how the current Court has run off the rails—and how to fix it—is to look at how its docket has changed. In one generation, we’ve gone from a Court that decided 150 cases a year only half of which the justices chose and only a handful of which divided the justices into their ideological camps to a Court that is deciding fewer than 60 cases each year, is hand-picking virtually all of them, and is skewing toward the very types of disputes that paint the justices into their most predictable (and divisive) corners. All the while, entire categories of cases—like direct appeals from state criminal convictions—have all-but disappeared from the docket, as cases at the frontlines of the culture war have taken center stage.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, Professor Vladeck will demonstrate, through a combination of historical, quantitative, and qualitative analyses, how one of the least controversial ways to “fix” the Supreme Court would be for Congress to reassert control over the justices’ workload—and to require the Court to spend more time deciding the types of technical, non-ideological disputes through which the justices historically behaved more like judges, and the Court looked more like a court. Docket reform may not seem tantalizing at first blush, but that’s exactly why it should be low-hanging fruit for even those most skeptical of the need to make changes to the Court.

About the Speaker

Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.

Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. Vladeck is also a highly regarded appellate advocate, having argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and over a dozen before various lower federal civilian and military courts. He has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award and his selection by the Order of the Coif to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2025.

Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is also a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is a member of the Board of Trustees of EarthJustice—the nation’s premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.

Vladeck graduated from Yale Law School in 2004—where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for outstanding moot court oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for best moot court team performance. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners); their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney; and their eleven-year-old pug, Roxanna.

Boston University strives to be accessible, inclusive and diverse in our facilities, programming and academic offerings. Your experience in this event is important to us. If you have a disability (including but not limited to learning or attention, mental health, concussion, vision, mobility, hearing, physical or other health related), require communication access services for the deaf or hard of hearing, or believe that you require a reasonable accommodation for another reason please contact Elizabeth Clancey (lawevent@bu.edu), please note that the Office of Disability Services requests 10 days notice to provide services.