She understood, better than many of her brethren, that the commonplace impression of the Supreme Court as the last word, the final authority, is fundamentally misleading. The Supreme Court is a political institution—not in a partisan sense, but rather in terms of the balance of power set forth in the Constitution. In momentous and hard cases, judicial review can be less a resounding judgment from On High than a kind of ongoing conversation between courts and legislatures—“no” to this, “yes” to that, and, on particularly sensitive cases like the death penalty or affirmative action, “try again.”
