While Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts characterized the rule of law as “endangered” on Monday evening, he avoided any mention of President Donald Trump’s relentless public attacks on the nation’s justice system, pointing instead to the trend of young people growing up without proper civics lessons.
Answering a question on “strengthening the rule of law,” Roberts said at a Georgetown University law school event that “one area where it’s most endangered is with young people.”
“Young people, they’re focused on high school and eighth grade and stuff like that. And how many people have really no understanding of what the role of courts are, what the different branches have to do, really even the notion of law is and what a Constitution is,” Roberts said.
He went on: “I do think you have to start as early as you possibly can, because otherwise it doesn’t become part of their understanding of government. When they’re cutting classes because they want to add all sorts of other stuff, I mean, certainly, civics is the first thing that goes, you know. And I think that’s really too bad, and we’re developing a situation where a whole group of young people is growing up having no real sense of how our system of justice works.”
Trump has routinely attacked individual judges who rule against parts of his agenda, apparently prompting his supporters to send anonymous pizzas to some of the judge’s homes. The move is interpreted as an intimidation tactic, as it shows how people know where the judge lives.
Over the first few months of his second term, the president has suggested he may openly flout court rulings, such as in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported Maryland man currently sitting in an El Salvadoran prison. His shaky familiarity with the Constitution was brought to the fore in an interview earlier this month where he suggested he did not know if he had to uphold due process rights.
Speaking onstage, the chief justice later addressed criticisms of his court, which controversially overturned the watershed 1973 abortion ruling Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the nationwide right to abortion.
The public has a “misunderstanding” of how often the current court overturns precedent, Roberts said. Past iterations of the Supreme Court overturned precedent multiple times per year, he said.
“You need to have appropriate standards. If you do it willy-nilly, there’s no real sense of which law is established,” Roberts said, adding that a ruling’s impact on the “stability of law” was among the considerations taken into account.
Roberts said criticism of his court is welcome “so long as it’s not trashing the justices.”
“The court has obviously made mistakes throughout its history, and those should be criticized, so long as it is in terms of the decision, really, and not ad hominem against the justices. I just think that doesn’t do any good,” he said.
Threats against individual justices in the wake of the abortion ruling prompted increased federal funding for their personal security.