Ever wonder just what’s the matter with the U.S. Supreme Court? Lisa Graves, a one-time Washington insider turned judicial reform advocate, has the answer.
Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights tells in often shocking detail how the nation’s highest court has been corrupted by outside ideologues. They have, over the past two decades, handpicked justices and carefully provided the Court with test cases to achieve desired ends.
Graves, a longtime contributor to The Progressive, finds plenty of blame to go around, but keeps her focus on what she sees as the root of the rot: Chief Justice John Roberts. Since his appointment to this role in 2005, Roberts has skillfully realigned the Court’s priorities to match those of its benefactors, along with the five other Republican-appointed Justices who constitute the Court’s ultra-conservative supermajority. And, in case after case after case, this realignment has led to the erosion of personal freedom; the expansion of corporate power; and the undermining of public safety, electoral fairness, and environmental protection.
Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights
By Lisa Graves
Bold Type Books, 368 pages
Publication date: September 30, 2025
“The bottom line is that John Roberts has presided over a Supreme Court that routinely limits the rights of ordinary people while elevating the rights of corporations and the powerful,” writes Graves. “The dramatic changes to the scope of legislative, executive, and judicial power that Roberts has orchestrated have strengthened both presidential power and corporate power in ways that make us less free and less safe and that even put the future habitability of our planet at greater risk.”
This book is a tour de force takedown of a man and his mission, one that does massive damage to Roberts’s fabricated image as a moderating force on the court. The Chief Justice, in Graves’s well-substantiated assessment, is a “regressive politician in judicial robes” who poses a grave if not existential threat to the republic. After famously pledging during his confirmation hearings to “call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat,” Roberts has in fact taken his share of swings—and even knocked a few out of the park.
“He presented himself as a dedicated institutionalist who sought to uphold American judicial traditions,” relates Graves, who has worked in all three branches of the federal government, including the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Far from being a protector, however, he has used his position as Chief Justice to orchestrate a pattern of extreme decisions that have unmoored American democracy from its foundations.” Through it all, Roberts “has established himself not as a fair referee but as a diabolically effective player rewriting the Constitution and remaking America in accord with his reactionary political agenda.”
Without Precedent also explores the Court conservatives’ outrageous behavior, including Clarence Thomas’s receipt of the millions of dollars in unreported gifts and trips, and Samuel Alito failing to recuse himself from a case involving rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, despite the fact that an upside-down U.S. flag and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—both appropriated by the rioters as insurrectionist symbols—flew from his Virginia home and New Jersey vacation house, respectively.
Then there is Roberts himself. He is by far the richest member of the Court, Graves says, thanks to the many millions his wife has raked in as a legal-placement recruiter—a job she began after her husband became Chief Justice. Neither Roberts nor his wife disclose which lawyers she has helped place into high-powered law firms, notes Graves, “so there is no way to know how much of their lifestyle is effectively being underwritten by lawyers who appear before the Supreme Court or sign on to briefs to the Court.”
In the twenty years that Roberts has been Chief Justice, the Court has permitted corporations and Super PACs to funnel an unlimited amount of funding towards candidates up for election; struck down what had been a Constitutional right to abortion; and greenlighted what Graves calls “illegitimate and undemocratic electoral maps that have all but eliminated incentives to seek compromise, fueling extremism and division.”
Meanwhile, the Roberts Court has largely eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, in part by ending a “preclearance” rule for states and localities with an extensive history of racially discriminatory voting. “The effect of Roberts’s work,” writes Graves, “has been to uphold laws that make it harder for many Black Americans to vote and have their vote meaningfully count.”
On gun violence, the Roberts Court has seized on its every opportunity to do the gun lobby’s bidding. In a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, it established gun ownership as an individual right rather than a collective one belonging to militias, and upended the District of Columbia’s ability to restrict handgun ownership and require that firearms be stored unloaded or outfitted with trigger locks. In a 2022 decision in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court struck down New York's long-standing limits on concealed carry of firearms. In 2024 in Rahimi v. the United States, the Court considered using that precedent to uphold the gun ownership rights of a man Graves describes as “an unstable [domestic] abuser with a history of shooting at strangers,” but ultimately declined to do so in that election year. Also last year, the Court struck down a ban on “bump stocks”—devices that convert semi-automatic rifles into de facto machine guns. That ban had been issued in 2017 by President Donald Trump.
On basic justice issues, the Justices seem unmoored. In 2024, the court’s conservative supermajority refused to stay the execution of a Missouri man who, in the declared opinion of his prosecutor, had been wrongfully convicted and was, in fact, innocent. That same year, Roberts penned a decision that partially exonerated some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Mercy is in the eye of the bestower.
Perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court last year granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, which Graves calls “a shocking and atrocious political intervention by political judges to protect a political candidate from their political party from facing the consequences for major crimes that substantial evidence indicated Trump had committed.” It is a ruling that has clearly emboldened Trump to engage in even more outrageous and likely criminal behavior.
Without Precedent explores the ways that people like Leonard Leo of the ultraconservative Federalist Society are pulling the strings behind a marionette Court., Leo has helped advise Republican presidents over the years on which judges are rightwing enough to serve on the Court. The Justices he helped appoint routinely refuse to step aside from cases in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” as the law requires.
Bold Type Books
The result is unequal justice, as shown by the Court’s continual hostility to people who lack power. In a 2023 case, Snyder v. United States, it effectively authorized public officials to accept bribes, so long as these are given afterward, as a “gratuity.” Last year in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Court okayed throwing people in jail for sleeping on the street.
“Rich and powerful people have always tried to rig the rules in their favor,” Graves reflects. “Now they are trying to take America backward and control who we can be, who we can love, and how we can care for our bodies, our families, and our world. They are putting the weight of their wealth on the scales of justice to diminish other people’s freedoms.”
Leo, for his part, has made his intentions perfectly clear. In a 2024 letter to numerous rightwing groups, he said his focus is on “funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision” in order to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” Marvels Graves, “This is the man who helped handpick the majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Things will likely get worse before they get better. There is every reason to believe the Court will continue to condone Trump’s wholesale breaches of law and the Constitution. In a case that went to oral argument in October, the Court’s conservatives seem poised to undo what little remains of the Voting Rights Acts by allowing redistricting that dilutes the Black vote. It has agreed to take a case that will likely curb restrictions on the ability of illegal drug users to own guns. And, Graves warns, the Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which gave same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide, could very well be reversed.
But Graves is not giving in to resignation. The book includes a list of reforms that could, over time, undo some of the damage the Roberts court has done. These include legislatively revoking the President’s ill-gotten immunity from criminal prosecution; passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act; putting an end to extreme partisan gerrymandering; imposing disclosure rules on groups that pour money into electoral campaigns; establishing a federal right to abortion and access to contraception; restoring the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators to do their jobs; passing a national ban on assault weapons and devices meant to increase their lethality; and limiting Justices to a term of twenty years.
Graves ends her book on an optimistic note: “We must remember day to day that progress is possible. The future is still unwritten, and it is ours to make, if we combine hope with wise action.” That’s good—and urgently needed—advice.
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Editor's note: This article was updated to clarify the dates of the Bruen and Rahimi decisions.