Today Brennan Center for Justice senior fellow Jesse Wegman launched a newsletter about the Supreme Court, Major Questions. A former member of the New York Times editorial board, Wegman will write about the Court’s rulings and their impact on American law and lives. He will also look at the growth in the Court’s power, how it weakens democracy, and what can be done to reform the institution.
“This is a rolling crisis with no clear end in sight. The Court’s nine justices enjoy immense power, getting the final word on many of the most contested legal and political questions in a nation of more than 340 million people,” Wegman writes in the debut issue of Major Questions.
The Roberts Court, Wegman says, has a “long and growing” list of offenses, including but not limited to “the invention of new doctrines (like the one that gives this newsletter its name) in order to overturn, almost always on partisan lines, acts of Congress or the Court’s own precedents that had survived for generations; and a string of destructive, destabilizing rulings that cannot be squared with any reasonable reading of constitutional text and history.”
In Major Questions, Wegman will look at reforms that can “fix this broken Court.”
At the Brennan Center for Justice, Wegman works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court. While serving on the Times editorial board, Wegman wrote about the Court, democracy, law and politics.
Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (St. Martin’s Press, 2020) and The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, forthcoming, June 2026).
Wegman has been a regular commentator on CNN, MS NOW, and many other national and local TV and radio programs. He earned a law degree from NYU School of Law. He publishes in the Times as a contributing writer.
Wegman’s writings for Major Questions are featured on the Brennan Center’s website with other Kohlberg Center work under a new banner, The Benchmark.
Subscribe to Major Questions here.
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About the Kohlberg Center
The Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court was established in 2024 thanks to the philanthropy of Jim Kohlberg. The Kohlberg Center catalyzes solutions to advance overdue reforms of the Court by bringing together legal and policy experts, historians, and researchers to advance ethics and accountability and forge broad and bipartisan support for solutions to strengthen this vital institution.
