The Young and the Lawless

Sarah Medina Camiscoli* June, 2026

Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. By Leah Litman. New York: One Signal Publishers. 2025. Pp. vi, 234. Hardcover, $29.99; paper, $20.

Introduction

We live in a lawless time (p. 2). A time in which the latest decision from the Supreme Court will send half the country applying for golden visas in Costa Rica and the other erecting flags to commemorate January 6th.¹ Whether the Court is deciding whether the president can deport legal residents,² state legislators can outlaw evidence-based medicine for vulnerable youth,³ or parents can make a mass exodus from public schools anytime a book mentions an LGBTQAI+ family,⁴ there is good reason to panic. Given this “recent unpleasantness” and the difficulty that many have with demystifying the role of the Court, Professor Leah Litman’s⁵ new book couldn’t be more timely. By wielding legal realism and blockbuster hits, Litman helps a wide audience of readers understand how the Supreme Court has become an “obstacle to democracy,” and why they need to step up.⁶

In Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, Litman employs the erudite wit of her podcast and a lineup of the feminist super-sheroes (and he-villains) from pop culture hits to demystify the power of the Court, contextualize the Constitution’s hairpin turn to the right, and call Progressives to action. She likens the Dobbs Court and the architects of originalism to Kens rioting in the feminist utopia depicted in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (p. 14). She exposes the animus behind the 303 Creative ⁷ Court, analogizing the movement to upend marriage equality to the movie Mean Girls, in which vindictive popular teens assemble a Burn Book to bully and exclude more marginalized students (p. 54). She explains the demise of voting rights in Shelby County,⁸ and the threats to campaign financing unleashed by Citizens United ⁹ through binge-worthy television shows, likening these events to the medieval warring factions of Game of Thrones and the class-debauchery of Arrested Development (pp. 93, 158). She even compares the cutthroat capitalism that fueled the dismantling of Chevron ¹⁰ to the bloodcurdling murders in American Psycho.¹¹ As Litman dances through thousands of references to landmark cases, legal scholarship, and pop cultural quips, she directly identifies her culprits: the aggrieved Reagan-era conservatives who invented originalism, the legal strategists of the Federalist Society, and the resulting conservative majority of the Roberts Court, who she argues are motivated by dark money and fringe conservative vibes (the kind of conservatism that awards Motherhood Medals while cutting day care).¹²

This Review argues that both the conservative fringe and establishment Progressives have contributed to constitutional decay (this includes me and, unfortunately, probably you).¹³ As a way forward, I suggest engaging in some reflective practices to change our bad habits and paying closer attention to the rights and resistance of more radical young generations; recent elections have shown that this strategy might work better than you think.¹⁴

Like Litman, I teach constitutional law. As a scholar, I work to democratize the law beyond law school, and I critique the failures of legal actors to protect dignity and democracy. I also watch an unhealthy amount of television.¹⁵ And while I agree that we are facing a moment of constitutional decay, I think that decay stems from more than conservative fringe insurrection (or as Litman calls it, a “Ken-surrection”).¹⁶ I believe the diagnosis of how we got here must also include the fact that legal actors across the political spectrum have, for far too long, been complicit in legally smothering and silencing the marginalized people they claim to represent.¹⁷ Constitutional democracy does not decay because a group of fringe conservatives decides it’s time to make room for men and horses.¹⁸ It decays because the republic no longer has to respond to its people.¹⁹ A group of conservatives with Reagan cardboard cutouts, legal strategists in Yale’s secret societies, and five people on the Roberts Court are just not Ken-ough.²⁰ The lawlessness that we see today—that is, the erosion of civil liberties and norms under the Constitution and the concentration of executive power under an authoritarian reality television star—grew both from nefarious anarcho-capitalists and from progressive leaders who allowed large groups of people to live in a perpetual state of structural inequity, administrative violence, and exclusion from legal knowledge production and decisionmaking.²¹ The shock only came when we, the legal actors and advocates who normalized the exclusion of marginalized communities, realized that we were next.

As a scholar, I focus specifically on how the lives of young people, particularly those aged fourteen to twenty-five who attend public schools, or who hold multiple marginalized identities, serve as laboratories of authoritarianism.²² I use this term within the context of children’s constitutional rights both to illustrate how youth are a group of people whose attack by or through the law signals “a danger that threatens us all,” and how their calls for help are silenced by state actors.²³ As I’ll argue in this Review, young people are entangled in the rise of authoritarianism because they are protocitizens—a group of people whose rights are in process and formulation at all times.²⁴ Further, young people experience the most severe levels of legal silencing of almost any group that this country claims to include in the social contract.²⁵ For example, detained migrant children, young trans kids, and youth voters never fully realized the rights that Dobbs, 303 Creative, Shelby County, and Citizens United eroded for us all.²⁶ More importantly, so many of these young people took to the streets, organized campaigns, and protested these legal threats. But they were not included, centered, or regarded as having much to offer legal actors.²⁷ I study how legal actors overlook the danger to democracy vis-à-vis youth rights and what insights the youth provide in their resistance—insights that could have saved us a lot of headache (and heart palpitations from a slew of breaking news notifications).²⁸ This Review will celebrate Litman’s bold, democratizing contribution (as well as her role as a scholar-activist-podcaster extraordinaire); it will also critique her diagnosis and call to action.

To do so, I’ll start with the CliffsNotes, summarizing Litman’s work into three categories: first, the erosion of equal protection of the laws via Dobbs and 303 Creative, as portrayed through the blockbuster movies Barbie and Mean Girls ; second, the blows to democratic elections via Shelby County and Citizens United, as portrayed through the bingeworthy shows of Game of Thrones and Arrested Development ; and third, the death of social welfare and administrative agencies via Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, as portrayed through the classic film American Psycho. After that, I’ll move on to a few hot takes, and argue that Litman overlooks some key players in the demise of democracy and some essential characters in her pop cultural references, while showcasing the value that mobilized young people play in building a functional democracy. I argue that establishment Progressives have played an important role in constitutional decay, youth rights have been a laboratory for the rise of authoritarianism, and that the way to call a bluff is to include the young and the lawless—that is, those mobilized young people who may seem too radical or fringe for more traditional progressive politics, and who you wish would skip out on next year’s holiday dinner (and who call your bluff too).²⁹

TLDR: You should read Litman’s Lawless and then go build political-legal coalitions with some mobilized young people. (Warning: You’re going to need some thick skin. The youth will probably call you a fascist and make fun of your fashion taste.)

I. The CliffsNotes

Part I wields Litman’s pop cultural references to Barbie, Mean Girls, Game of Thrones, and American Psycho to share her account of the rise of the fringe conservative legal movement. Each section focuses on the means by which Reagan-era legal strategists, Federalist Society members, and the ultrarich armed themselves with originalism, religious liberty, and dark money to take down civil liberties, democratic elections, and social safety nets.

A. A Fifty-Year Ken-surrection Secured a Mean Girls-Majority on the Court

Litman opens the book by diving into Barbie Land, dramatizing a conservative movement determined to “restore a patriarchy where men are on top” (p. 14). In her rendition, the conservative fringe jurists and legal strategists who developed originalism in the 1980s are the Kens of Barbie Land. They, like the Kens, felt invisible in a plastic, progressive world for Barbies (Here, Barbie Land represents a country where the Constitution protects abortions, recognizes racism, and uses evidence-based research).³⁰ Despite progressive denial that fringe conservatives could realize their fantasy of a postracial Handmaid’s Tale,³¹ these guys and their originalist project were in fact “Kenough.” They gained some real traction in designing a world “where men run everything,” and remade “the feminist utopia of Barbie Land into a patriarchy” (p 14). While Progressives, like Barbie, disregarded the threat of these fringe conservatives, the movement crafted the “jurisprudential method known as originalism” and used it to “launch the Ken-surrection,” culminating in an epic win for the Kens—the overturning of Roe v. Wade.³²

Importantly, Ken helps explain a key instrument of the conservative movement: originalism. Like the Kens who built widespread consensus in Barbie Land for the “patriarchy,” conservative legal strategists were able to infect our constitutional imagination with originalism and influence sympathetic judges, who slowly turned the U.S. Constitution into a “Ken-stitution,” one case at a time (pp. 28–40). As Litman explains, originalism offers a way to talk about advancing a social conservative agenda without having to say things like “women really should be the family caretakers who stay at home,” all under the guise of faithfully interpreting the original meaning of the Constitution (p. 27). Litman shows how the Kens were patient. They didn’t eat the marshmallow.³³ They played the long game. And they won. Dobbs was the marshmallow the Kens never ate, and now they’re making s’mores.

Tracing the ontology of originalism through the rise of the Federalist Society, Litman explains how the Supreme Court came to decimate forty-nine years of precedent with Dobbs.³⁴ This is one of the most important moves she makes—helping people understand that Dobbs itself was possible because it was the culmination of a fifty-year conservative legal movement to control the Supreme Court that began around the time that Roe was decided.³⁵ Litman moves the reader through classic legal scholarship such as Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel’s warning about the demise of Equal Protection and Roe, Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist theory of the state, and Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s account of the Federalist Society’s counterrevolution. She also makes pit stops for J.D. Vance’s weird comments about cat ladies and Taylor Swift’s hit “But Daddy I Love Him” (pp. 19–21, 244). She pans out to explain the continuation of the country’s “patriarchy problem” after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment through the demise of the Equal Rights Amendment.³⁶ She zooms back in to break down how Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt ³⁷ was a clear sign that Dobbs was coming, walking the reader through both the complicated “context and fallout from the litigation” (pp. 32–33). Litman’s wit, humility, and accessible framing make the book feel like something between the best stand-up comedy reel on your favorite politics-conscious comedian’s Instagram page and the constitutional law course of your dreams—the one where you get the best jokes from four hundred episodes of Strict Scrutiny, learn Supreme Court jurisprudence, and grasp legal realism without having to pay $250,000 for a law degree. Litman’s style helps readers both digest the gravity of Dobbs ’s “curtailment of women’s rights” (p. 14) and keep the momentum going to get to the next assault on civil liberties: marriage equality.

Once Litman illuminates the Ken-surrection of substantive due process in Dobbs, she moves on to explain the Mean Girls turning Equal Protection doctrine into their personal Burn Book.³⁸ To do so, she juxtaposes 303 Creative with Obergefell ³⁹ to explain the origin of another weapon of mass destruction against progressive constitutionalism: the First Amendment (p. 54). After highlighting how the Supreme Court came to permit forced birthing experiments on unconscious women, Litman explains how that same jurisprudence was used to attack healthcare and education.⁴⁰ This shift emerged from another jurisprudential creature of the conservative fringe movement—the legal fiction that the First Amendment protects religious conservatives who would like to discriminate against gender and sexual minorities in education, healthcare, employment, and public accommodations (pp. 80, 84). In this dramatization, the Kens of the originalist counterrevolution become the Mean Girls of the religious liberty movement (In fact, Litman shows how many of them are, unsurprisingly, the same people). However, instead of wielding the “men and horses” of 1776 to dissolve substantive due process, they wield religious liberty to dissolve equal protection (Here the high school cafeteria is a metaphor for democracy, and the “queen bees” of the school are a metaphor for the conservative majority on the Court) (p. 54).

Given that 303 Creative is (to put it charitably) a hot mess, Litman moves carefully through the cases, critiques, and rhetoric that landed us here. She spells out how the Court “inverted the concepts of discrimination and equality” to protect “the religious and social conservatives who don’t believe in equality” against the minority groups who need it (and believe in it) the most (p. 54). She begins the story of the Burn Book with the conservative rallying cry post-Obergefell : that “future cases should try to limit Obergefell—by invoking the ‘interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment’” (p. 66). Litman then maps the demise of both substantive due process and equal protection rights from Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ⁴¹ and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia ⁴² to 303 Creative.⁴³ But she does not only explain how conservatives wielded religious liberty to argue that conservative believers were discriminated against as a result of legislation that protected LGBTQAI+ communities’ rights. She dives into the Federalist Society and their stronghold on the Court, explaining “if the justices do the wrong thing, then the Federalist Society will pull a Gretchen Wieners from Mean Girls and shriek, ‘You can’t sit with us!’”.⁴⁴ Readers who did not attend law school might not know what a profound impact the Federalist Society has had on legal culture. Most people have probably not witnessed the Federalist Society members hosting law school Chick-fil-A luncheons⁴⁵ that foment and further a decidedly anti-egalitarian vision of the Constitution. Litman illuminates the impact of the group, explaining how the appointment, reputation, and jurisprudence of the conservative justices is in many ways influenced by robust, well-funded networks like the Federalist Society that recruit their members with the promise of fancy clerkships, a Spicy Deluxe Sandwich, and those waffle fries with the sweet mayo.⁴⁶

B. Creepy Viking Kings and Oligarchs Have Hijacked Elections

With the Fourteenth Amendment looking like “Weird Barbie” (this is the Barbie that has been mutilated by a toddler, with her hair ripped out, face painted with crayon, and limbs broken),⁴⁷ Litman moves onto the Fifteenth Amendment and the decimation of voting rights. Using the ominous refrain in Game of Thrones (“winter is coming”),⁴⁸ she explains how conservative legal strategists and justices have worked to dismantle democracy vis-à-vis the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and enlisted their fire-breathing corporations to dismantle campaign finance and corruption law. She first centers Shelby County, calling it a “story . . . about power [where] white Southern conservatives and the Republican Party did everything they could to maintain their political stranglehold . . . including embracing minority rule and disenfranchising minority voters” (p. 93). Litman likens the “ruthless, brutal approach” of white Southern conservatives and the Republican party to the “warring camps [of Game of Thrones] who will stoop to anything to win and maintain power” (p. 93). Here, she analogizes conservative jurists to “sadist teen King Joffrey . . . [who] insists on crushing his enemies even after he holds all the cards” (pp. 93–94). Litman uses the “[w]inter is coming” omen to “warn[] of the dark times to come” and “call to get things done”—here, the Voting Rights Act—“while the weather (or the big wall keeping out the ice zombies) [holds]” (p. 100).

Next, Litman returns to the original Kens: Reagan-era Republicans, white southerners, and Federalist Society members who, within the context of voting rights, “promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reflect Republicans’ position on voting rights—namely, that voting rights are overrated and sometimes unconstitutional” (pp. 105, 113). This political-legal context built the political will to upend the VRA, culminating in Shelby County. The Supreme Court removed the guardrails against racial discrimination in voting by lifting federal preclearance requirements for local district mapping and voting regulations, opening the door to mass erosion of voting rights.⁴⁹

With the VRA still smoldering, Litman jumps into Citizens United to bring a new culprit to the scene: dark money. Specifically, Litman argues that dark money has convinced the Roberts Court to “overrul[e] the Court’s previous decisions and strik[e] down, in its entirety, the federal prohibition on corporate election expenditures” (p. 159). To illustrate this, we move from incestuous Viking fiefdoms to the billionaire family at the center of one of the early 2000s’ most offensive⁵⁰ sitcoms—Arrested Development.⁵¹ For Litman, the Bluth family serves as a quaint metaphor to illustrate the “justice[s’] clueless self-own might” and refusal to hear criticism about their privilege and conflicts of interest (p. 144). Using the show’s wealthy villains, Litman explains how Shelby County ’s hammering of the VRA combined with Citizens United ’s campaign finance shock-doctrine mean that a disenfranchised voter is likely to find “their voice[] drowned out by wealthy corporations with their own special-interest agendas.”⁵² Together, these two cases inverted principles of equality and democracy by concluding that “treating everyone ‘equally’ means that the government must ignore economic inequality” (p. 163).

Like the Kens who manufactured originalism to take control of Barbie Land (and every uterus), and the Mean Girls who argued that their religious liberty grants them the right to discriminate against LGBTQAI+ folks, proponents of Citizens United claim that free speech includes their right to have “outsize influence over politics and unparalleled access to political leaders, including the justices themselves” (pp. 143, 165). Litman sees the north star of Citizens United as just the beginning of a “Gilded Age” where the Constitution “limits the government’s ability to prevent economic inequality from spilling over into other parts of democracy” (pp. 158, 166). And she’s not wrong. Former President Obama’s warning⁵³ about Super PACs is playing out before our eyes: Just a few months after Citizens United, the DC Court ruled in SpeechNow.org v. FEC ⁵⁴ that the limits on campaign contributions under the Federal Election Campaign Act violated the First Amendment. Several years later, the Court took up McCutcheon v. FEC ⁵⁵ to release the ultrawealthy from restrictions on the number of PACs they could inundate with money. And then came McDonnell v. United States ⁵⁶ to remove pesky government intervention and make it a little easier to sprinkle corruption into the mix.⁵⁷ The checkbooks of the wealthy have more robust constitutional protections than a gay couple has against the homophobic Mean Girls running the schools, hospitals, housing, foster care facilities, and public accommodations in their state.⁵⁸

C. American Psychos Have Decapitated the Administrative State

Haunted by a future with a Mean Girls-majority on the Court and electoral politics in the hands of bloodthirsty Viking kings and billionaires, Litman leaves us with one last reason to flee the country: Conservatives are taking down the administrative state, and the Court is going to let them. In her final act, Litman likens the current conservative Supreme Court majority to the classic American Psycho—a sadistic Harvard graduate specializing in mergers, acquisitions, and murder. She lays out how the administrative branch provides expert regulation and basic necessities to millions of Americans, using Chevron to explain administrative deference (p. 195). She then explains how the Koch brothers and lawyers from Americans for Prosperity (a subset of her American Psychos) funded Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo as a “full-frontal challenge to the Chevron doctrine” (pp. 205–06). These legal strategists, like Patrick Bateman, fulfilled a fantasy to decapitate government regulation and cut the administration of government welfare into little pieces.

But Litman’s analogy of American Psychos does not just stop at the massacre of government regulation. There is another layer to Litman’s story—the conservative strategists stop at nothing as they chainsaw progressive wins because they “want to fit in.”⁵⁹ This is how Litman wraps up her analysis of how we got here: The concert of Federalist Society lawyers, fringe conservative jurists, and dark money hoarders are driven by political influence and reputation both in and outside of the courtroom. Whether it is a lawyer wielding one Supreme Court justice’s mother’s political legacy or a conservative philanthropist talking Affordable Care with another justice over an elaborate dinner, Litman highlights the outsized influence money and relationships have on present jurisprudence (pp. 179, 206).

This is perhaps Litman’s most damning assessment of the Supreme Court today: “The uber-rich have used their money to essentially create an alternative universe that allows the (Republican) justices to feel that their unpopular views are not so unpopular after all” (p. 177). In Litman’s depiction, the conservative strategists who wine and dine justices also exchange sardonic monologues and scorn at progressive desires to “end apartheid . . . slow down the nuclear arms race . . . stop terrorism and world hunger . . . provide food and shelter for the homeless . . . oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women.”⁶⁰ This is where the alarm sounds. If we don’t act soon, dark money will “remake [the Supreme Court] into one that will disregard the law by rubber-stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences” (p. 181).

Part I has provided the tasting menu version of Litman’s five course feast of legal analysis, pop culture, and Y2K nostalgia: the birth of originalism in a Court of Kens; the Mean Girls trolling the LGBTQAI+ community via the First Amendment; the demise of democratic elections into warring fiefdoms, fire-breathing corporate dragons, and class-debauchery; and the mass murder of the administrative state. Like her nationally acclaimed podcast⁶¹ and law school lectures, Litman’s bold account provides readers with a lesson in legal realism and a breakdown of how the Court has converted the legacies of the abolition of enslavement and the civil rights movement into protections against anti-white racism and heterophobia.⁶² Part II will build on Litman’s account, serving a few hot takes on the responsibility of progressive legal actors in the demise of democracy and offering a different call to action.

II. A Few Hot Takes

While Litman’s book offers an accessible and sobering dose of legal realism, there are three areas where she could get a bit realer—and three pop cultural references from her existing picks that could have helped her get there. First, Litman disregards the ways that Progressives have also given bad, antidemocratic vibes (or as Sasha, my chosen pop cultural reference from the Barbie movie, calls it, fascism). While fringe conservatives schemed to realize their world of men, horses, and octomoms,⁶³ establishment Progressives continued to, as Sasha says, set social movements back decades, exclude marginalized communities from shared governance, and worship capitalism.⁶⁴ For example, sidestepping the decay of youth abortion rights on a technicality and disregarding the demands for abortion rights for detained youth on the steps of the Capitol didn’t exactly help stop the demise of Roe.⁶⁵ Here, I work with Sasha’s character—the only lead Gen Z character of color in Gerwig’s Barbie—to call the progressive bluff and overindexing on white feminism. I argue that establishment Progressives should promote cultures of democracy (creating democratic vibes) where shared governance and the integration of marginalized and mobilized people in the creation of law is the norm, not the exception.

Second, Litman misses the way that youth rights have served as the laboratories of authoritarianism in which legal actors have perverted the rule of law (and Progressives, acting like Plastics-wannabes, have let them). Thus, in addition to building spaces for shared governance at the local, state, and federal levels, a powerful place to take these steps is within the realm of children’s rights. The line for children’s civil liberties is, in many ways, the line for all of our rights. The extent to which Progressives have allowed children’s rights to be “a common punching bag and source of grievance” is the extent to which they have risked constitutional democracy at large (p. 226). To illustrate this point, I’ve chosen Cady Heron as my pop cultural reference—the protagonist of Mean Girls who pretends to be a Plastic as a strategy to take them down but eventually just ends up causing the very same harm. In the film, the young queer characters (Janis and Damian) are the ones who call her out. We see a similar dynamic in the ways that intergenerational queer and trans activists have called out establishment Progressives for focusing on military and marriage at the expense of meeting the survival needs of the most marginalized queer people.

Third, Litman’s account focuses much more on her diagnosis than on practical solutions. Consequently, Litman’s call to action overlooks how more radical progressive social movements (particularly those led by mobilized young people) have been dismissed for their unapologetic and antiestablishment politics. For this point, I choose Maeby Fünke of Arrested Development—the youngest Bluth, harsh family critic, and scam artist. As the youngest and most rebellious character in a family of mindless wannabe-oligarchs, Maeby reflects how young, Progressive Movement leaders have protested dysfunctional political-legal institutions. Further, her character serves as a warning for establishment Progressives: The large constituency of civically engaged progressive youth will become civically disengaged and destructive towards democracy so long as they are excluded from improving it.⁶⁶

A. Barbie (And Progressives) Can Be Fascist, Too

In Litman’s telling of the rise of conservative fringe and the demise of the Fourteenth Amendment, she likens Reagan-era conservatives, the Federalist Society, and the Court’s conservative majority to the Kens of Barbie Land, a constituency of noncontributing men who feel marginalized by the Barbies and rise up to fight for the patriarchy and men and horses (and for our purposes, originalism).⁶⁷ It follows, then, that President Barbie, Supreme Court Justice Barbie, and the rest of the political elite of Barbie Land must be the Progressives. Sasha, the one politically conscious Gen Z-er of color featured in the film, reads the progressive Barbie Land party to filth. She asserts that Barbie has (and I argue, many of the political-legal elite have) set back key movements fifty years, destroyed young people’s “innate sense of worth” and “kill[ed] the planet with [their] glorification of rampant consumerism.”⁶⁸ Sasha’s diatribe lays out a key dynamic that Litman seems to overlook in her account: the role that the progressive establishment and white feminism have played in the compounding crises we find ourselves in today—rising anti-immigrant violence, a worsening climate crisis, the accelerating power of corporate money in elections, and widening war and global conflict.⁶⁹ Too often, Progressives like Barbie believe that they (well, we) are the saviors of the “soul of the nation,” when in fact it is Progressives who have exacerbated these crises and used marginalized communities and social movements as bargaining chips for liberal legalism.⁷⁰ And instead of listening to the largest, most progressive generation in U.S. history,⁷¹ many of us have instead ridiculed them for their concerns, their culture, and their impatience with our apologist tendencies.⁷² In this way, Sasha’s speech provides us with a few pointers on what Progressives need to heed in order for democracy to work: youth demands for a more radical culture of democracy, rejection of racial capitalism, and bold efforts to stop the climate crisis. The fascist insult isn’t going anywhere until we put young people center stage in mainstream progressive politics.⁷³

I, like Sasha, reject the idea that Democrats always equal democracy, because even Democrats have antidemocratic vibes. So I do not believe that either fighting for Supreme Court expansion with a Democratic majority or “small, everyday things” will get us there (pp. 223, 231). In fact, in the context of a movie that fundamentally critiques fascism and in a moment where people are likening Trump’s accumulation of unitary executive power to FDR, Litman’s lauding of FDR’s efforts to expand the Court is in tension with her larger argument about mitigating the obstacle that the Court poses to democracy.⁷⁴ This moment requires a robust theory of democracy, not a few more progressive justices and vegan senators. To achieve Litman’s goal of “ensuring the Court is more democratic and better reflects the people[,]” (p. 230), we need to fight the bad vibes with “democratic vibes.”⁷⁵ “Democratic vibes” refers to creating a culture of democracy where diverse, intergenerational, multiracial groups of people have opportunities to coauthor the law and shape each other’s perspectives along the way.⁷⁶ In this kind of democracy, the elders don’t dismiss the youth as reckless, radical, and uneducated. That means fighting tooth and nail to draft school board policies with both the Gen Z influencer cousin and the evangelizing uncle who ruined the last family reunion.⁷⁷ Notably, the conservative establishment has found a way to include your evangelizing uncle in their agenda.⁷⁸ However, Progressives have not yet included your influencer cousin.

Promoting democratic vibes for progressive constitutionalism will mean drafting a state budget in conversation with radical solar punks and designing tenant unions with bicoastal elites in BLM Target tees.⁷⁹ We, the People (as weird and dysfunctional as we may be), must shape the law that governs our daily lives. To build power outside of the Court, we will have to bring together vulnerable people who do not like one another (and may have thought at one time that the other had engaged in satanist Pizzagate rituals or had sex with a couch).⁸⁰ Disclaimer: My suggestion has many unpleasant features to it, and it will require a lot of therapy and box-breathing.

This is why I think Sasha is a better metaphor through which to spur progressive readers to action than a demonized Ken or idealized Barbie. Sasha is a democratic theorist-in-action, concerned both with the plastic promises of progressive leaders and the marginalization of her opponents.⁸¹ Sasha embodies the principles of popular constitutionalism, critical race theory, rebellious scholarship, and youth movement law. She demands that legal actors across parties and legal institutions look at their own role in constructing, expanding, or promoting systems of legal oppression.⁸²

Sasha, like these young leaders, criticizes the progressive establishment and forces Barbie to reckon with the harm of exclusionary politics. She symbolizes youth who call out the failures of liberalism and institutional Progressives. Civically engaged youth remain as critical of progressive political-legal actors as they do of conservative legal actors, so they help sniff out bipartisan hypocrisy and democratic decay—they demand a culture of democracy from us all. In these ways, Sasha is the perfect democratic cultural theorist. She steps up to coauthor a way out of the morass of “men and horses” with a multiracial, intergenerational coalition of people from two radically different worlds. But Sasha’s character, like the Kens, is similar to some main characters in social movements. Young people have been organizing these kinds of radically diverse coalitions since before President Trump’s first term,⁸³ and Progressives have failed to elevate their demosprudence—the interpretation, resistance, and reimagination of law that enhances the possibility of democracy.⁸⁴

Azar v. Garza is an instructive case on the relationship between constitutional decay, youth rights, and reproductive justice within the context of Roe.⁸⁵ In Garza, federal courts split over whether Roe applied to undocumented youth in U.S. detention facilities.⁸⁶ The Supreme Court “disposed of the petition (and sidestepped the sanctions kerfuffle) through a Munsingwear order.”⁸⁷ Instead of critiquing the government’s refusal to provide abortion care to unaccompanied, detained minors seeking refuge in the United States, a unanimous court focused only on the fact that she had in fact received an abortion, which rendered the entire case moot.⁸⁸ The Court did not even mention that the abortion in question was protected under Roe.⁸⁹ And while the Court was not required to address factual disputes in this circumstance, it could have affirmed the application of Roe to minors, particularly undocumented minors.⁹⁰

Notably, while the Supreme Court avoided this question, youth activists protested. They demanded freedom for the undocumented minor and her right to access an abortion.⁹¹ They launched a “Justice for Jane” campaign, “dedicated to the undocumented minors the Trump Administration attempted to deny reproductive health care.”⁹² Young activists flooded the capital with personal abortion stories, intending to “set the record straight” about young people’s constitutional right to an abortion.⁹³

But don’t be fooled. Garza was not the first instance of a major flop by progressive lawmakers and jurists, “set[ting] the feminist movement back 50 years”⁹⁴ by ignoring youth voices. Formally trained law practitioners and legal scholars across political persuasions have epically failed to include youth contributions in their canon of legal knowledge.⁹⁵ Youth movements have been “unapologetically intersectional,”⁹⁶ and over the last twenty years, “mobilized youth, like those who came before them, have seeded a constitutional renewal in a moment of democratic decay; they demanded commonsense gun laws, abolition, climate justice, racial justice, economic justice, migrant justice, gender justice, education justice, health justice, and housing justice.”⁹⁷ They have called for the abolition of racial capitalism,⁹⁸ the prison industrial complex,⁹⁹ global warfare,¹⁰⁰ and mass deportation.¹⁰¹ They have devised radical and creative ways to share resources, empower one another to step into leadership, and maintain accountability.¹⁰²

In short, progressive leaders have acted with a “clueless self-own [that] might as well have been ripped [from Barbie Land, Mean Girls, or] Arrested Development” (p. 144). Much like Justice Alito and Lucille Bluth, the Bluth family matriarch, Progressives have also responded to challenges to their views with a deflective shrug saying, “If that’s a veiled criticism about me, I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it” (p. 144). But instead of being cowed, youth movement leaders have been calling everyone’s bluff and demanding more radical democracy for over a decade—undocumented high schoolers walking across the border in graduation gowns,¹⁰³ trans youth patients rallying their doctors for healthcare, and college students occupying college campuses.¹⁰⁴And even though they have not always asked to be part of the existing canon or regnant legal institutions, our failure to listen has contributed as much to the Ken-surrection as the Federalist Society’s movement for men and horses.¹⁰⁵

B. Our Establishment Friends of the Democratic Party Act like Cold, Hard Plastics

If the Court’s conservative majority are the villains of Litman’s Mean Girls metaphor (“a deluded group of girls [who] declare themselves queen bees, act like jerks, and make room for others to do the same—all while insisting they’re the real victims” (p. 54)), then I would argue that the film’s wannabe Plastic protagonist, Cady Heron, may just be the perfect stand-in for the progressive political-legal establishment. Like Cady, who tries to navigate the terrain of a Mean Girls-majority high school by joining their group, using their language, and cosigning their Burn Books, progressive legal actors have in many ways done the same with respect to conservative justices.¹⁰⁶ Progressive jurists and scholars have created their own kinds of originalism and even use the term to frame constitutional interpretation writ large in their textbooks.¹⁰⁷ Federalist Society meetings, panels, and events are regularly attended by many self-proclaimed progressive scholars, legal practitioners, and students who attend without engaging in critical dialogue.¹⁰⁸ Progressive legal educators and universities have gotten in line with fringe conservative colleagues to support the blacklisting, criminalization, and expulsion of student protestors.¹⁰⁹

As Janis Ian (one of the non-Plastics, and one of Cady’s only genuine friends) would say, Progressives have acted like “Cold, Shiny, Hard, PLASTIC[S]”¹¹⁰—ingratiating themselves with the conservative legal movement rather than speaking out against injustice and building more robust coalitions to mitigate the erosion of civil liberties. Like Cady Heron, we as progressive jurists, scholars, and practitioners have failed to “solve the problem in front of [us],”¹¹¹ and have neglected key threats to democracy and civil liberties for the most marginalized in our country. Instead, we spoke the language of the Plastics and spent our resources appeasing them. And the youth are over it. They, like Janis, won’t endorse a fake. They’ve told us in their protests, their organizing, and their voting: The progressive establishment is plastic.¹¹² This is why Janis, whom Cady uses as a token in her pursuit of political, plastic capital, serves as an effective mobilizing metaphor. I think if we want to mobilize a cynical generation of young Progressives, we should focus less on the ways that Justice Alito is like Regina George, and more on the ways that Progressives have more often used the LGBTQAI+ community to get a place with the Plastics rather than meet our most basic needs. Well before Dobbs and 303 Creative, progressive jurists and legal actors just let the bodily autonomy, equal protection, and voting rights of multiple marginalized youth dissolve and their protest cries to go unanswered.

I use the term “laboratories for authoritarianism” to capture how the erosion of children’s rights can become a foundation upon which other rights are eroded. Youth rights are the perfect test case for authoritarianism as young people are vulnerable in unique ways; their autonomy is limited by the authority of their parents and the state, and lawmakers can cloak their plans to remake government institutions and rollback of civil liberties in themes of care and protection of children.¹¹³ In this way, young people are what some scholars call “proto-citizens”¹¹⁴ of democracy—citizens in progress, who are most vulnerable to the dismantling of their constitutional rights. Their decaying rights signal danger for us all.¹¹⁵ It is not a coincidence that conservative fringe actors use marginalized children as their “favorite objects of attack[,]”¹¹⁶ or as justification for draconian policies. But it is equally unacceptable that progressive establishment actors turn the other cheek. The legal construct of the child provides the perfect site to design unquestioned obedience to authorities at the expense of personal freedom.¹¹⁷ But when the conservative fringe (recognizing this opportunity) brought their bad vibes and grievances to children’s rights, too many Progressives became Cady Heron and acted like Plastic bystanders. They left children as flat characters in the story of democracy. Progressives, like the Plastics, relegated children’s rights to a separate table in the cafeteria of democracy. Like the “cool Asians,” the “desperate wannabes clique,” and the “unfriendly Black hotties” in Mean Girls,¹¹⁸ children’s rights only get recognition when it serves the Plastics—and they get no help from Cady.¹¹⁹

In this way, Litman overlooks the way in which the Court wielded children’s rights in public education and extracurricular activities to prop up its argument in 303 Creative, grounding homophobia in “traditional values.”¹²⁰ The extent to which the progressive justices allowed their conservative colleagues to erode children’s protocitizenship in the name of protecting children created more vulnerability for democracy writ large, striking down state antidiscrimination statutes along the way.¹²¹ This was not just the doing of the conservative justices—it was also the complicity or passivity of the Progressives.

Notably, both parties in 303 Creative used children’s interests to make their argument, despite not having a single child plaintiff involved in the case. First, the plaintiff-appellant web designer said she refused to accommodate same-sex couples because “[s]ame sex marriage . . . ‘harms society and children.’ ”¹²² The majority also had their own spin on children’s interests; they relied on West Virginia v. Barnette ¹²³ and Tinker v. Des Moines,¹²⁴ the two foundational cases regarding children’s free speech, to justify their decision to deny same-sex couples the protection of public accommodations laws. The Court likened 303 Creative ’s requirement to serve the public to “the State of West Virginia’s efforts to compel schoolchildren to salute the Nation’s flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.”¹²⁵ Both, they argued “invade[d] the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment . . . to reserve from all official control.”¹²⁶ And while the dissent critiqued the relevancy of Barnette, it did not speak out against the majority’s weaponization of children in the name of the First Amendment or Equal Protection, despite the fact that the case itself did not concern children at all. ¹²⁷ Instead, the dissent lamented that “it is dispiriting to read the majority suggest that this case resembles [Barnette],” and asserted the majority had “ ‘trivialize[d] the freedom protected in Barnette ’ to equate the two.”¹²⁸ There is no mention of the risk of trivializing children’s rights to bolster defenses against discrimination. While this omission might have seemed unimportant at the time, it paved the way for future perversions of Barnette and 303 Creative within the context of constitutional rights. Barnette is now used to justify parents’ constitutional right to remove their children from school on days when LGBTQAI+ people are discussed in school curriculums.¹²⁹ And 303 Creative has been used to bolster a mental health counselor’s free speech right to suggest conversion therapy to her trans youth clients.¹³⁰ By sitting with the Plastics and wearing pink on Wednesdays, progressive legal actors and liberal justices have failed to protect protocitizens from structural violence masked as principled law.

C. Political-Legal Coalitions Must Include the Youth . . . Or They Will Scam Us

This leaves me with my third point for how I’d beef up Litman’s account. If we’re not going to push for Progressives to pack the Court and rule for four terms before pulling their own one-two-Korematsu,¹³¹ what is the move? How do we both promote democratic vibes and build with young people to reform the Supreme Court and reimagine our democracy? Here is my hottest take of them all: Progressives need to build a bigger, better, more robust and radical political-legal coalition of progressive legal actors, beyond the sheroes in Lawless. So where is the ultraprogressive counter to the Federalist Society?¹³² Where is the “rebellious, progressive constitutionalism designed and enforced in solidarity with mobilized [youth]”?¹³³ Where are the grassroots efforts to inject these new frameworks into law schools and local politics? We’ve seen the playbook. Where is ours? Here’s where I will call in the black sheep and baby genius of the Bluths, Maeby Fünke. Maeby Fünke is the daughter of Lindsay, one of the Bluth heirs, and the youngest character in the Bluth family (although the family constantly questions if she was “Maeby” adopted). Her character serves as a foil to her wealthy, out-of-touch family. She watches their moves, critiques their failures, and finds a way to scam them at their own game. She is aware of her family’s shortcomings but exploits them only for her own gain—building new personas and worlds outside of the Bluth establishment.¹³⁴

If we do not coordinate efforts across multiracial, intergenerational, political-legal coalitions, the Maeby Fünkes of the world will use the existing system only to the extent that they can deceive, manipulate, or enrich themselves. Litman’s concern about nihilism is real (p. 234), but I don’t think the next generation wields nihilism to disengage. They are more the trolling type. The longer the progressive establishment continues to roll back youth rights, ignore youth protests, and deny youth the basic right to meaningfully participate in elections, the youth will become increasingly attenuated from the decaying institution of liberal electoral politics.

Litman suggests that there are a few “small things” that can “jump-start change” (in addition to few big things like packing the Court, setting term limits, creating a binding ethics code, and amending the Constitution to overturn the Court’s decision on presidential immunity) (pp. 223, 227, 231). In her concluding chapter she argues that change can come if Progressives (1) “[p]ersuad[e] people to care about the courts” (p. 223); (2) “[s]tay on top of elections” (p. 224); and (3) “advoca[te] and organiz[e]” to build political power at the local level (pp. 224, 227). However, Litman’s account does not include the work of existing social movements and the failure of the progressive establishment to acknowledge their work. A more robust plan for a path forward feels like the necessary sequel to Litman’s book. (I promise it would be a good sequel—not like Mean Girls II, which was a very weird musical and did nothing for my middle school nostalgia).

The Progressive Party is doomed unless it learns to see the judiciary through the eyes of the younger, mobilized generation, invite those young people to vote in elections, and organize and advocate alongside them. While mobilized young people “rarely use[] the language from the ‘published opinions of courts or the statutory language of legislators,’ ” they have strong demands for the “laws and policies in their schools, universities, and communities with principled ends.”¹³⁵ In the past year alone, youth activists have mobilized some of the most “cross-cutting coalitions for racial justice in U.S. history through social movement organizations such as Movement 4 Black Lives, March for Our Lives, Students for Justice in Palestine, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, #PoliceFreeSchools, Law Students for Climate Accountability, and The Futures Institute.”¹³⁶ These young people have demanded the very laws and policies “that conservative activists and jurists identify as the target of their ire.”¹³⁷ But progressive legal actors have largely ignored their voices. Calling the conservative bluff involves more than denouncing the patriarchy as “men and horses.”¹³⁸ It also requires standing with these young leaders; integrating intergenerational demosprudence into legislation, amicus briefs, court documents, and spaces of legal education and networking; and supporting their fight for their right to vote.¹³⁹

The same framework applies to electoral politics. Shelby County, Citizens United, and Loper Bright may have created outsized influence for corporate entities, but what if Progressives created outsized influence for the largest, most progressive generation in U.S. history? The way that progressive actors can “ensure that courts do not get in the way of democracy” and “ensur[e] more congressional control over the courts” (p. 232) is to get more people voting and running for office who want that too. Young people, like incarcerated adults, intellectually disabled people, and residents in U.S. colonies and territories, can’t join those efforts if they can’t protest, participate, or vote. That is the last piece of this puzzle. To get good democratic vibes and uphold youth rights, Progressives need to radically expand the right to vote and pioneer new spaces for participatory law and policymaking for those who have been calling their bluff from the sidelines. Hesitant to let youth vote? Well, I imagine many “cool moms” of the Progressive Party may have felt the same way about minor access to abortion in detention facilities or student free speech in K–12.¹⁴⁰ Conservatives are already working on swinging the pendulum the opposite direction and will continue unless we assemble a bigger and broader progressive coalition.¹⁴¹ They see the threat of youth political power. But do we see the opportunity?

Conclusion

Over the past ten years, as conservative fringe has gone on a civil-liberties-killing rampage, more young people have mobilized than any group since the civil rights movement. While Lawless sets a bold, democratizing new standard for legal scholarship, I demand a sequel. General calls to vote, mobilize, and call the Court’s bluff overlook the power of existing movements to turn the tide and the Progressive Party’s failure to wield its most powerful asset—radically progressive young people. That is where I conclude: The way forward after a Ken-surrection, a Mean Girls-majority take over, the Winter of Voting Rights, and an American Psychos administrative state killing spree is to look to the young—those that the progressive establishment has dismissed as unprincipled, radical, and downright lawless. As the existing legal institutions decay, young visionaries and movement leaders are pointing in new directions and calling everyone’s bluff. We should follow them (even though I, too, am not entirely sure what that will entail). It is the overlooked, rebellious, and straight up brazen youth characters that have time and time again signaled danger for democracy, called our bluffs, and found a way forward.¹⁴²

* Assistant Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School. Thank you to my fabulous research assistants Elia Jefferson-Gonzalez and Ayo Bowman and to Leah Litman, Sarah Swann, Tanvi Korgaonkar, and Sa’Real McRae for their helpful comments.