Communicative Legitimacy: The Supreme Court’s Hidden Cultural Binaries in the US Civil Sphere

Abstract

How does the US Supreme Court establish its legitimacy? Over the last two hundred years in US society, the Court has interpreted the US Constitution on watershed issues such as slavery, segregation, and marriage equality. And yet the Constitution is just 7591 words. A puzzle thus emerges: how does the Court intelligibly interpret this short text for US society? This article develops a new theoretical and empirical cultural sociological account of such Supreme Court decision-making, which it calls “communicative legitimacy.” According to this theory, which draws on Jeffrey Alexander’s civil sphere theory, the Court consistently and inevitably draws on a shared American cultural discourse, thus rendering Constitutional values intelligible and legitimate to the broader civil sphere. This article shows this through two historical case studies. First, it explores the cases guaranteeing and then overturning the right to abortion, from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). Second, it reviews the cases guaranteeing the right to bear arms, beginning with District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The two sets of cases, at first blush, appear diametrically opposed: Roe is a triumph for the left, Heller a victory for the right. But, in fact, these cases reveal the same pattern: the Court’s defenders draw on the discourse of liberty to hail the decision as a restoration of the Constitution, while the opposition draws on the discourse of repression to accuse the Court of “creating a Constitutional right out of nowhere.” This article thus unveils a hidden Supreme Court meta-language, contributing a new cultural sociological understanding of the Supreme Court as a societal institution with unique communicative authority and symbolic power in US society.