The Supreme Court delivered a string of major losses for liberal Americans in recent weeks. Two in particular stand out: In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court’s conservative majority upheld a state law outlawing minors’ access to puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices created a new constitutional entitlement for religious parents to shield their children from learning about LGBTQ people in public schools.
最近几周，最高法院给自由派美国人带来了一系列重大损失。尤其是尤其脱颖而出：在美国诉Skrmetti案中，法院的保守派多数人维持了一项州法律，禁止未成年人获得青春期阻滞剂和激素来治疗性别烦躁不安。在Mahmoud诉Taylor诉泰勒案中，大法官为宗教父母创建了一个新的宪法权利，以保护其子女在公立学校学习LGBTQ人。
Defeats like these have become the norm since Donald Trump jolted the Court rightward. For many progressives, the narrative is straightforward: Ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues.
自从唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）向右震撼法院以来，这样的失败已成为常态。对于许多进步主义者而言，叙述是简单的：雄心勃勃的教义，共和党任命的法官在系统上拆除了自由主义的自由主义先例，而不是对民主党任命的同事的热情而无能为力的异议。
This account accurately captures the speed, scope, and partisanship of the Court’s conservative counterrevolution. Yet it obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses. Rulings such as those in Skrmetti and Mahmoud are the predictable consequences of liberal litigation strategies that invite a hostile Court to codify an agenda that the Court’s conservative majority was handpicked to establish.
该帐户准确地捕获了法院保守反革命的速度，范围和党派。然而，它掩盖了一个困难的事实：进步律师为这些损失铺平了道路。诸如Skrmetti和Mahmoud的裁决是自由派诉讼策略的可预测后果，邀请敌对法院将法院的保守派多数派批准建立。
The Supreme Court cannot act without cases. It cannot initiate litigation. To reshape doctrine in the ways the justices want, they depend on litigants to bring suits to them. Both of these cases represent unforced errors; liberal lawyers chose to fight for ideas the justices were explicitly appointed to oppose. Poorly chosen liberal challenges are a gift to a conservative majority eager to recast constitutional law.
最高法院不能没有案件采取行动。它不能发起诉讼。为了重塑大师想要的方式，他们依靠诉讼人为他们带来西装。这两个案例都代表了无强制的错误；自由律师选择为思想而战这些法官被明确任命为反对。选择的自由主义挑战是渴望重新施加宪法的保守派多数派的礼物。
Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court’s inconsistency is very revealing
保罗·罗森茨威格（Paul Rosenzweig）：最高法院的不一致之处在于
Progressive lawyers need a strategic recalibration, something I argue in a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article. They need to stop reflexively turning to federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court. Avoiding high-risk, high-profile litigation in inhospitable forums does not mean abandoning constitutional advocacy. It means redirecting that advocacy toward the democratic arenas of constitutional politics, such as legislatures, ballot initiatives, grassroots organizing, and the broader public square. In these spaces, progressives can build popular support, blunt the impact of adverse rulings, and shape the constitutional culture that, over time, influences judicial doctrine itself.
进步律师需要战略重新校准，我在即将发表的康奈尔法律评论文章中所说的。他们需要停止反思地转向联邦法院，尤其是最高法院。避免在荒凉的论坛上避免高风险，高调诉讼并不意味着放弃宪法倡导。这意味着将倡导宪法政治的民主领域进行重定向，例如立法机关，投票计划，基层组织和更广泛的公共广场。在这些空间中，进步主义者可以建立大众的支持，钝化不利裁决的影响，并塑造宪法文化，随着时间的流逝，这种文化会影响司法教义本身。
The Skrmetti case began in April 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee to block the state from banning certain treatments of gender dysphoria for minors. (I’d worked at the ACLU as a legal fellow a year earlier but had no involvement in the case.) After an initial trial-court victory for the liberal plaintiffs, the state appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit. That court overturned the lower court’s decision and upheld the ban.
SKRMETTI案始于2023年4月，当时美国公民自由联盟起诉田纳西州阻止该州禁止对未成年人的性别烦躁不安的治疗。（一年前，我在ACLU担任法律研究员，但没有参与此案。）在最初为自由原告的审判胜利之后，国家向第六巡回法院提出了上诉。该法院推翻了下级法院的裁决，并维持了禁令。
The ACLU could have accepted this regional setback. The Sixth Circuit’s decisions bind just four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Although the outcome was surely painful for the plaintiffs, the ruling did not overturn other lower-court decisions protecting transgender rights that had been decided in other states. Declining to appeal need not constitute an endorsement of the decision. Rather, it would have reflected a pragmatic assessment that the Court’s conservative justices were more likely to amplify than alleviate harm.
ACLU可能已经接受了这种区域挫折。第六巡回法院的决定仅约束四个州 - 米奇根，俄亥俄州，肯塔基州和田纳西州。尽管结果对原告肯定很痛苦，但该裁决并未推翻其他较低的决定，以保护其他州决定的跨性别权利。拒绝上诉不必构成对该决定的认可。相反，这将反映出务实的评估，即法院的保守法官比减轻危害更可能放大。
Instead, the ACLU (later joined by the Biden administration) petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. The Court’s conservative majority obliged and accepted the case for full review in June 2024. The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts earlier this month, which was joined by all of his fellow Republican appointees, is the unhappy result.
取而代之的是，美国公民自由联盟（后来由拜登政府加入）向最高法院请愿审查此案。法院保守的多数派有义务并接受了2024年6月的全面审查的案件。首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨（John Roberts）本月初作出的决定，由他所有的共和党同胞任命者加入，这是一个不愉快的结果。
In concrete terms, the decision allows states with previously blocked bans to seek their restoration, and emboldens states without bans to enact them, assured of constitutional cover. Yet when the Supreme Court adjudicates, it does more than resolve a dispute between two parties. It shapes the trajectory of constitutional interpretation and political contestation. Its rulings influence not just courts and legislatures but also public discourse and perception. By affirming the result and much of the rationale of the Sixth Circuit—and condoning the open animus toward transgender people voiced by Tennessee lawmakers—the Court didn’t merely uphold one type of law. It radiated anti-transgender sentiment in explicit constitutional doctrine and the wider constitutional culture that shapes politics, law, and public dialogue.
从具体的角度来看，该决定允许具有先前禁令的国家寻求其修复，并勇于履行禁令来制定其宪法掩护。然而，当最高法院裁定时，它不仅可以解决两党之间的争议。它塑造了宪法解释和政治竞争的轨迹。它的裁决不仅影响法院和立法机关，还影响公众的话语和看法。通过确认结果和第六巡回法院的大部分理由，并宽恕了田纳西州立法者表达的跨性别者的公开敌意，法院不仅要维护一种法律。它以明确的宪法学说和塑造政治，法律和公众对话的更广泛的宪法文化来放射反变态的情感。
Legally, Skrmetti deprives transgender advocates of a key sex-discrimination argument and signals to lower courts that the highest court takes a skeptical view of transgender-rights claims made under equal-protection law. Politically, it encourages Republican officials to pursue even more restrictive laws targeting transgender people. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump-administration figures praised the ruling and vowed to escalate their crackdown on transgender rights, including access to gender-affirming care treatments for minors in blue states.
从法律上讲，Skrmetti剥夺了跨性别的倡导者的关键性别歧视论点，并向下级法院发出信号，称最高法院对根据同等保护法提出的跨性别者权利要求怀疑。从政治上讲，它鼓励共和党官员遵守针对跨性别人士的更限制的法律。总检察长帕姆·邦迪（Pam Bondi）和其他特朗普管理的人物称赞了这项裁决，并发誓要升级他们对跨性别权利的镇压，包括获得蓝色州未成年人的性别肯定护理疗法。
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Skrmetti concurrence—joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and substantively endorsed by Justice Samuel Alito—goes further in inviting discrimination against transgender people. Before oral argument, some progressives had hoped that Barrett would serve as a swing vote to strike down the law. Instead, she staked out a position even more extreme than the majority opinion, writing that transgender people do not qualify as a suspect or quasi-suspect class under the equal-protection clause.
大法官艾米·康尼·巴雷特（Amy Coney Barrett）的Skrmetti同意（由法官克拉伦斯·托马斯（Clarence Thomas）全力以赴，并得到塞缪尔·阿利托（Samuel Alito）大法官的认可），进一步邀请歧视跨性别人士。在口头辩论之前，一些进步主义者希望巴雷特将作为挥杆投票来击败法律。取而代之的是，她放弃了比多数意见更为极端的立场，在同等保护条款下写道，跨性别者不符合犯罪嫌疑人或准谋求阶级的资格。
Her reasoning, if embraced by lower courts, would uphold sweeping discriminatory policies targeting transgender adults—such as bans on receiving gender-affirming care and using public facilities—under the guise of “legitimate regulatory policy.” And it telegraphs to lawmakers agitating for more aggressive attacks on transgender people that the Court will not stand in their way.
她的推理，如果受到下级法院的接受，将维护针对跨性别成年人的歧视性政策，例如禁止接受性别肯定的照顾和使用公共设施，以“合法的监管政策”为幌子。它给立法者的电报煽动了对跨性别者的更具积极攻击，法院不会妨碍他们的路。
Advocates should know that this is a risk they are taking. Supreme Court justices have little stopping them from addressing unraised issues and disturbing unrelated precedent. The Roberts Court has made something of a habit of doing so, with its conservative justices frequently reaching to decide questions not before them. In Skrmetti, instead of merely applying precedent on the appropriate standard for evaluating Tennessee’s law and then remanding to the Sixth Circuit for further proceedings, the conservative majority decided the law’s constitutionality outright—an aggressive and unnecessary move.
拥护者应该知道这是他们正在冒险的风险。最高法院的大法官几乎没有阻止他们解决无关的问题并打扰了无关的先例。罗伯茨法院养成了这样做的习惯，其保守派法官经常伸出援手，以确定他们之前的问题。在Skrmetti中，保守党多数派决定该法律的宪法性是侵略性和不必要的举动，而不仅仅是评估田纳西州法律的适当标准，然后再送回第六巡回法院进行进一步诉讼。
That this was totally avoidable underscores that liberal advocates would be wise to refrain from channeling long-shot cases to unsympathetic courts—not just the Supreme Court but many federal appellate courts as well, which are filled with ideologically vetted conservative judges from the previous Trump term. Even if liberals do occasionally win at appellate courts, those victories can prove Pyrrhic, setting up conservatives with a fast track to the Supreme Court.
这是完全可以避免的强调，即自由主义者的拥护者将明智地避免将长期案件引导到无情的法院，不仅仅是最高法院，但许多联邦上诉法院也充满了以前的特朗普任期的意识形态审查的保守主义法官。即使自由主义者偶尔会在上诉法院获胜，这些胜利也可以证明是比尔希克，并为最高法院的快速道路设立了保守派。
Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats. After adding books with LGBTQ characters and themes to elementary curricula, the public-school district in Montgomery County, Maryland, created a notice and opt-out system for parents who wanted to withdraw their kids from instruction with the materials. The district later removed the opt-out system following protests from LGBTQ families that found it stigmatizing and discriminatory.
Mahmoud诉Taylor案提供了一个警示性的故事，即最初的自由主义胜利变成了更大的失败。在将LGBTQ角色和主题的书籍添加到基础课程中，该课程是马里兰州蒙哥马利县的公立学校区，为希望从材料指导中撤回孩子的父母创建了一个通知和退出系统。在LGBTQ家庭抗议后，该地区撤离了退出系统，发现其污名化和歧视性。
Then a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents with young children objected to the removal. By all accounts, these parents were sincere in their religious convictions. They sought accommodations that neighboring school districts had given similarly situated parents; none wanted to ban the books entirely from the school. Many of the objecting parents were comfortable with their kids reading the books at more advanced ages. Yet the district refused to compromise, dismissing hundreds of parental complaints requesting a restoration of the opt-out. What could have been resolved through negotiation transformed into a culture-war flash point and a lawsuit.
然后，一个穆斯林和基督教父母与幼儿的联盟反对撤职。众所周知，这些父母对自己的宗教信仰是真诚的。他们寻求邻近学区为父母类似的住宿。没有人想完全禁止学校的书籍。许多反对的父母对他们的孩子们在更高级的年龄读书感到满意。然而，该地区拒绝妥协，驳回了数百名要求恢复退出的父母投诉。通过谈判转变为文化战争闪点和诉讼，本来可以解决的。
From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit, and conservative media outlets regularly covered even routine procedural developments. That should have alerted the district that the stakes were far greater than local policy.
从诉讼开始时，学区应该看到警告标志。贝克特基金会（Becket Fund）是一个强大的宗教自由组织，在过去的十年中赢得了八个（零）最高法院的案件，代表父母参加他们的诉讼，保守的媒体经常涵盖甚至常规的程序发展。这应该使该地区提醒股份远大于当地政策。
A strategic retreat—restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari—would have shown prudence, not capitulation. Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians.
战略务虚会 - 在法院授予证书之后，审查了选择退出并寻求合法的行动来提出诉讼，这将表现出审慎而不是投票。取而代之的是，该地区按下。它的临时胜利在审判和上诉阶段，然后加剧了最高法院的逆转，该法院现在已经重塑了全国范围内的宪法学说。罗伯特法院在裁决父母时，延长了几乎不间断的条纹，其中有利于自由运动的索赔人，主要是保守的基督徒。
Mahmoud imposes a rigid, nationwide rule that sharply limits schools’ ability to balance inclusion with parental concerns. Discovering a new constitutional right for parents to opt out of teaching “subtle” themes that conflict with their religious beliefs, the decision strips locally elected school boards of the power to make nuanced curricular judgments and hands it to federal judges. It saddles schools with new administrative burdens, inhibits the development of pluralistic curricula, and invites ideological censorship masquerading as religious accommodation.
马哈茂德（Mahmoud）施加了一项严格的，全国性的统治，这大大限制了学校与父母关注的能力。该决策是在当地当选的学校董事会，发现与他们的宗教信仰相抵触的“微妙”主题的新宪法权利，以进行划算，以做出细微差别的课程判断并将其交给联邦法官。它使学校负担新的行政负担，抑制了多元化课程的发展，并邀请伪装成宗教住宿的意识形态审查制度。
Ironically, a local effort to affirm LGBTQ dignity in a county of 1 million residents led the Supreme Court to inflict a blow to that dignity across a nation of 340 million. Much was lost in the crossfire. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, Mahmoud threatens the “very essence” of American public education and democracy.
具有讽刺意味的是，在一个由100万居民的县确认LGBTQ尊严的当地努力导致最高法院对一个3.4亿个国家的尊严造成了打击。在交火中丢失了很多。正如索尼亚·索托马约尔（Sonia Sotomayor）法官在她的异议中警告的那样，马哈茂德（Mahmoud）威胁着美国公共教育和民主的“非常本质”。
For advocates in the progressive legal world, deprioritizing litigation will require a theoretical shift, a move away from the court-centric constitutional vision that has defined progressive legal thought since the Warren and early Burger Courts and has been sustained by occasional liberal victories in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. It will necessitate recognizing that the Court is not the sole or even primary engine of constitutional interpretation.
对于进步法律界的拥护者来说，剥夺诉讼将需要理论上的转变，这是从沃伦和早期汉堡法院以来定义了以法院为中心的宪法愿景的转变，并在雷恩奎斯特和罗伯茨法庭上偶尔取得了自由胜利。这将有必要认识到法院不是宪法解释的唯一甚至主要的引擎。
The Court’s pronouncements on constitutional law are important, of course. But other institutions and spaces—legislatures, referenda, classrooms, workplaces, media, even group chats and other parts of the public square—have a role to play in the articulation of constitutional ideas. De-emphasizing the courts as sources of legal interpretation and policy change can allow progressives to correctly conceptualize constitutional politics as a participatory, democratic project with institutional and noninstitutional dimensions, not a top-down one outsourced to nine people on the Supreme Court.
当然，法院关于宪法的声明很重要。但是，其他机构和空间 - 法律，全民公决，教室，工作场所，媒体，甚至是集体聊天和公共广场的其他部分）在表达宪法思想中起着作用。将法院作为法律解释和政策变革的来源取消强调可以使进步主义者正确地将宪法政治概念化为一个参与性的，民主的项目，该项目具有机构和非机构的维度，而不是在最高法院外包到九个人的自上而下。
The public’s views should matter a great deal. No Court, however reactionary, operates in a vacuum or with impunity. Justices are shaped by the same gravitational social and political forces as everyone else. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1921, “The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.”
公众的观点应该很重要。没有法院，无论是反动的还是有罪不罚的。大法官与其他所有人相同的引力社会和政治力量塑造。正如本杰明·卡多佐（Benjamin Cardozo）法官在1921年所观察到的那样，“席卷其余人的潮汐和潮流并没有在他们的课程中转身并通过法官。”
Polling shows that most Americans, including four out of every five Republicans, support restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Even in liberal Maryland, two-thirds of voters oppose LGBTQ-focused curricula for young students. Asking a conservative court to override that sentiment—to go where many Democratic voters have yet to go—was never viable. Without public opinion on their side, liberal litigators had little leverage or hope of winning.
民意调查表明，大多数美国人，包括每五名共和党人中的四名，都支持对未成年人的性别照顾的限制。即使在马里兰州，三分之二的选民也反对针对年轻学生的以LGBTQ为重点的课程。要求保守派法院覆盖这种情绪（去许多民主党选民尚未去的地方）永远不会可行。自由诉讼者没有公众舆论，几乎没有赢得胜利的希望。
I saw this disconnect up close at the ACLU. My colleagues were smart and dedicated, carrying the immense emotional weight of fighting for the fundamental dignity of vulnerable people in a climate of growing prejudice and political attack. But many treated any doubts about transgender rights as simple bigotry. Although this approach foregrounded empathy for transgender people, it often failed to genuinely engage with the majority of Americans, who had questions about athletic competition and medical decisions for minors.
我看到了ACLU近距离的断开连接。我的同事们很聪明又敬业，在为偏见和政治攻击的气氛中，为弱势群体的基本尊严而战的巨大情感体重。但是许多人将对跨性别权利的任何疑问视为简单的偏执。尽管这种方法对跨性别者表示了同理心，但它通常无法真正与大多数美国人互动，他们对未成年人的体育竞争和医疗决策有疑问。
Leah Litman: The archaic sex-discrimination case the Supreme Court is reviving
利亚·利特曼（Leah Litman）：古老的性别歧视案最高法院正在复兴
Rather than speak directly to these concerns, liberal litigators sometimes scorned public opinion, confident in the righteousness of their views. As a recent New York Times Magazine feature revealed, the legal advocates behind Skrmetti operated from academic and activist theories of sex and gender that were out of the mainstream. While public support for transgender rights and the medical consensus on treatments for minors’ gender dysphoria fractured, advocates such as the ACLU doubled down on rhetorical purity rather than persuasion. In one widely shared post, the ACLU declared, “Men who get their periods are men. Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.” Another post dismissed as a “MYTH” the near–universally held view that “sex is binary, apparent at birth.” This kind of messaging garners engagement in insular, algorithm-driven online spaces but does not create a cultural foundation that moves skeptical voters and conservative judges. A political and legal strategy anchored in Judith Butler is not going to convince Brett Kavanaugh.
自由派诉讼者没有直接谈到这些关注点，而是有时会嘲笑公众舆论，对他们的观点的公义充满信心。正如最近的《纽约时报》杂志专题报道的那样，Skrmetti背后的法律倡导者是从主流和性别的学术和激进主义理论中运作的。尽管公众对跨性别权利的支持以及对未成年人性别烦躁不安的治疗的医疗共识，但诸如ACLU之类的倡导者对修辞纯度而不是说服力降低了一倍。在一个广泛的分享帖子中，美国公民自由联盟宣称：“有年龄的男人是男人。怀孕并分娩的男人是男人。”另一篇文章被视为“神话”，即“性行为是二进制，显而易见的，出生时”。这种消息传递吸引了以孤立的，算法为驱动的在线空间的参与，但并没有创造出持怀疑态度的选民和保守派法官的文化基础。基于朱迪思·巴特勒（Judith Butler）的政治和法律战略不会说服布雷特·卡瓦诺（Brett Kavanaugh）。
This recalibration doesn’t mean giving up on litigation altogether. But it does mean approaching it with greater realism, aiming for incremental change, not sweeping wins. It requires reading the judicial landscape honestly, studying conservative legal thinking carefully, recognizing when legal action may do more harm than good, and accepting some losses in order to preempt even bigger ones. For example, the Sixth Circuit’s Skrmetti opinion, written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, clearly foreshadowed where Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were likely to land, given Sutton’s influence on contemporary conservative legal thought and the intellectual proximity of his approach and their own. Ditto for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee to the Fourth Circuit who dissented in Mahmoud.
这种重新校准并不意味着完全放弃诉讼。但这确实意味着要以更大的现实主义接近它，旨在进行渐进的变化，而不是赢得胜利。它需要诚实地阅读司法景观，仔细研究保守的法律思维，认识到何时法律行动可能弊大于利，并接受一些损失，以抢占更大的损失。例如，首席法官杰弗里·萨顿（Jeffrey Sutton）撰写的第六巡回法院的Skrmetti意见显然预示着罗伯茨，卡瓦诺（Kavanaugh）和巴雷特（Barrett）可能会降落，因为萨顿对萨顿（Sutton）对当代保守主义法律思想的影响以及他的态度和自己的智力接近。同上是A. Marvin Quatterbaum Jr.法官，他是第四巡回法院的特朗普任命，他在马哈茂德不反对。
There’s a revealing paradox in contemporary liberal legal advocacy at the Supreme Court. Many progressives describe the current Court as dangerously rogue and reactionary. Yet their actions suggest a lingering faith in the Court’s legitimacy and potentiality as an agent of progressive change. This dissonance surfaces when an ACLU lawyer who calls the Supreme Court a “vile institution” is the same person who brought Skrmetti to it. Ultimately, a Court that cannot be trusted to protect rights should not be empowered to undermine them.
最高法院在当代自由法律倡导中有一个明显的悖论。许多进步主义者将现任法院描述为危险的流氓和反动。然而，他们的行动表明，作为渐进式变革的代理人，对法院的合法性和潜力具有持久的信仰。当一位称最高法院为“邪恶机构”的公民自由联盟律师是将Skrmetti带入它的人时，这种不和谐就会浮出水面。最终，不应信任保护权利的法院不应受到授权破坏权利的权利。
The path forward lies in organizing, legislating, and persuading, not in supplicating before an antipathetic bench. If they take this new path, progressives may find that they can cultivate constitutional power in places the Court cannot reach.
前进的道路在于组织，立法和说服力，而不是在抗心理替补席之前恳求。如果他们采取这一新途径，进步主义者可能会发现他们可以在法院无法达到的地方培养宪法权力。
