Supreme Court of the United States in fiction

Like many institutions that draw public interest, the Supreme Court of the United States has frequently been depicted in fiction, often in the form of legal drama. In some instances, real decisions rendered by real courts are dramatized, as in Gideon's Trumpet and the seminal trial in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Other depictions are purely fictional, but center on realistic issues that come before the court. Television series centered on dramatizing the happenings of the court have proven to be short-lived, and have tended to receive overall negative critical reaction.^[1][2] One reason that has been suggested is that the Supreme Count is a court of appeals, whereas most legal drama portrays trial courts. Appeals may appear "bookish" in contrast to the theatrical storytelling of trials, especially juries. Furthermore, American audiences are not very knowledgeable about or interested in the Supreme Court.^[3]

Television series[]

• First Monday (13 episodes in 2002, starring Joe Mantegna and James Garner). Mantegna portrayed a fictional Joseph Novelli, a moderate and potential swing vote appointed to a Supreme Court evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. Garner was the conservative Chief Justice.
• The Court (3 episodes, also in 2002, starring Sally Field)
• The West Wing involved frequent discussions or depictions of fictional past and present Supreme Court justices. Two episodes ("The Short List" in 1999, and "Celestial Navigation" in 2000) center on the nomination of "Roberto Mendoza," played by Edward James Olmos, as the first Hispanic Justice. A third episode, "The Supremes" in 2004, dealt with the issue of preserving ideological balance on the Court. The President makes a deal with the Republican Congress to simultaneously appoint a very liberal judge "Evelyn Baker Lang" (played by Glenn Close) as the Court's first female Chief Justice, and a very conservative judge, "Christopher Mulready" (played by William Fichtner) as an Associate Justice. The 2000 episode "Take This Sabbath Day" opened with a scene depicting the Court's main chamber.
• In Boston Legal, Alan Shore and Denny Crane argue two cases before the Supreme Court during the series. In "The Court Supreme", Shore argues for overturning the death penalty sentence of a mentally handicapped man convicted of raping a young girl, which was based heavily on the 2008 case Kennedy v. Louisiana. In the series finale "Last Call", Shore returns to the Court to argue for Crane being allowed access to an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease.
• In the 1992 The Simpsons episode, "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", Bart Simpson is shown as ultimately becoming Chief Justice of the United States.
• In the Picket Fences episode "May It Please the Court", broadcast on 18 November 1994, defense attorney Douglas Wambaugh (played by Fyvush Finkel) and District Attorney John Littleton (played by Don Cheadle) engaged in oral arguments before the Court (with actors playing the real justices); Supreme Court oral argument veteran Alan Dershowitz guest starred as himself, advising Wambaugh on strategy for addressing the Court. The case dealt with the admissibility of a murderer's confession.
• Recount is a 2008 movie depicting the Florida election recount at the end of the 2000 Presidential Election in the United States. At the end of the movie, actors who looked like attorney David Boies, attorney Theodore Olson, and the nine justices sitting on the Supreme Court in 2000 reenacted key sections from oral argument of Bush v. Gore. Two actors read sections of opinions written by Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens.
• Outlaw (8 episodes in 2010) starred Jimmy Smits as the fictional Cyrus Garza, a Justice who resigns from the bench to start his own law firm, as a way to more directly promote the ends of justice. The show was placed on hiatus after three episodes, and was never brought back.^[4][5]
• Scandal (Season 2) features Associate Justice Verna Thornton (Debra Mooney) as a primary antagonist for the first half of the second season. Aware that President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III (Tony Goldwyn) ascended to the presidency through voter fraud in Defiance County, Ohio she attempted to have him assassinated. Suffering with terminal cancer, she was pressured by Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton) to give up her seat, to which she refused. She is eventually suffocated in hospital by President Grant so she cannot reveal the truth about his election, with her death being made to look like the result of the cancer.
• In House of Cards (Season 3), President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is approached by Associate Justice Robert Jacobs (Jonathan Hogan) who requests he be allowed to retire due to having started to develop alzheimers. However, Underwood expresses his desire for Jacobs to remain on the court until he has passed groundbreaking job creation legislation. Underwood later tries to discourage his political rival, Solicitor General Heather Dunbar (Elizabeth Marvel) from running against him by offering her Jacob's place on the court, but she announces her candidacy before he can formally nominate her. Another named member of the court is Associate Justice Moretti (). The court is shown to be composed of three women and six men, two of whom are African-American.
• Political Animals (2012 miniseries) features Associate Justice Diane Nash (Vanessa Redgrave), the first openly gay member of the court. She serves as a friend and mentor to Secretary of State Elaine Barrish (Sigourney Weaver).
• Madam Secretary (Seasons 2, 3 and 4) features occasional appearances of Chief Justice Frawley (Morgan Freeman), a close friend of Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni). Freeman also serves as an executive producer for the show.
• Veep (Season 6) sees former President Stuart Hughes nominated to a vacant position on the Supreme Court by President Laura Montez (Andrea Savage) after the death of Associate Justice Tenny. Hughes becomes the second person after William Howard Taft to serve as both President and as a Supreme Court justice.
• In Homeland (Season 7), President Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel)'s decision to fire four members of her cabinet to prevent them from invoking the 25th Amendment is challenged in the Supreme Court, who reject her dismissal of the secretaries as an illegal act and thus allow the 25th Amendment to be invoked and her to be temporarily replaced in office by Vice President Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges).
• Designated Survivor (Season 2) features Chief Justice Peter Koemann () in the season finale, who confronts President Tom Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) about his Chief of Staff trying to influence the decisions of the court in relation to potential criminal charges being brought against him.
• Salvation (Season 2) features the Supreme Court deciding in a case between President Pauline Mackenzie (Tovah Feldshuh) and the treacherous former Vice President/Acting President Monroe Bennett (Sasha Roiz), with Bennett arguing that his removal from office and Mackenzie's reinstatement was illegal and unconstitutional. However, when the court is deadlocked 4-4 and the tiebreaker Chief Justice Martin Cheng (Hiro Kanagawa) is still deliberating, a blackmailed court clerk detonates a suicide vest in the building, seriously injuring Cheng and causing moderate injuries to the other judges. As riots break out in Washington, DC between supporters of Bennett and Mackenzie, Cheng is woken from a medically induced coma and is able to release his decision, rendering the case 5-4 in favour of Pauline Mackenzie. Another named justice is Associate Justice Praeger ().
• How to Get Away with Murder (Season 4) features a Supreme Court session in episode 13, in which the protagonist, Annalise Keating (Viola Davis), brings a class action suit against the Federal Government for not providing effective public legal counsel, thus violating the 6th Amendment. This episode is also part of the crossover event between the same-universe TV show Scandal, and also features Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington). The court is composed of Chief Justice Peter Montgomery (Jesse D. Goins), Associate Justice Mark Spivey (Tom Irwin), Associate Justice Helen Bass (Cathy Ladman), Associate Justice Alberto Gutierrez (), Associate Justice Strickland (Denis Arndt) and two other unnamed justices.
• Shooter (Season 3) features a significant subplot regarding the Supreme Court. A secretive cabal known as Atlas operating within the government pressures President Alvarez (Benito Martinez) to nominate appellate judge and former Attorney General of Utah Ray Brooks (Michael O'Neill) to fill the vacant seat of Chief Justice, which would allow him to act as their swing vote in decisions for decades to come. However, when Brooks commits suicide due to atrocities he took part in during the Vietnam War, the President refuses to nominate a replacement recommended by the group, and decides to work towards taking them out. Having needed Brooks swing vote in an upcoming case, the group tries and fails to assassinate Associate Justice Gibson (Rhea Perlman) to swing the vote 4-3 in their favour, bombing the Supreme Court building as a distraction and attempting to use a suicide bomber to kill the evacuated justices at a safehouse in Arlington, Virginia. Other named justices include Associate Justice Ramiro Dominguez (Castulo Guerra) and Associate Justice Stewart.
• Y: The Last Man (Season 1) briefly mentions three surviving female justices of the Supreme Court after an unexplained event causes all male mammals with a Y chromosome to die globally. They are Associate Justice Nadine Gwynther, Associate Justice Dina Corrette and Associate Justice Orania Landrith. After the event, dubbed the "global die off", they are the three highest ranking people in the judicial system of the United States.

Film[]

Fictional depictions[]

• The Talk of the Town, a 1942 film with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman. Grant plays a radical fugitive who takes refuge at Jean Aurthur's home, which is being rented by Supreme Court nominee Colman. He is seated as an Associate Justice in the final scene.
• First Monday in October (1981), this story about the first woman on the Supreme Court came out in 1981, the year Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman on the court. The film was based on a Broadway production which had opened in 1978, and starred Jane Alexander as the central Justice Ruth Loomis.
• The Pelican Brief, a 1993 feature film in which a major plot point is the assassination of two fictional Supreme Court Justices, Rosenberg and Jensen.
• Swing Vote, is a 1999 TV movie in which the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Roe vs. Wade decision and thrown the issue of abortion rights back to the individual states. Alabama has subsequently outlawed abortion, and prosecutes for first degree murder when a woman terminates her pregnancy. Newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Joseph Kirkland (Andy García) will turn out to be the deciding vote in a case that could reinstate a woman's right to choose but Kirkland finds himself surrounded by proponents of both the pro-choice and pro-life agendas, with his fellow justices, his secretary and even his wife trying to influence his vote. Other fictional justices portrayed in the film are: The Chief Justice (Robert Prosky)); Justice Clore Cawley (Ray Walston); Justice Will Dunn (Harry Belafonte); Justice Daniel Morissey (James Whitmore); Justice Sara Marie Brandwynne (Kate Nelligan); Justice Hank Banks (Albert Hall); Justice Eli MacCorckle (Bob Balaban); Justice Benjamin "Rip" Ripley (John Aylward), and retired Justice Harlan Greene (Milo O'Shea).
• In the 2002 Steven Seagal movie Half Past Dead, Linda Thorson plays Supreme Court Justice June McPherson, who must be rescued after being kidnapped by terrorists while attending the execution of a killer whom she had previously sentenced to death.
• In the 2006 film, Idiocracy, after 500 years of dumbing down, the United States has replaced the Supreme Court with the "Extreme Court", which sentences the protagonist of the film to a "rehabilitation" death match.

Fictionalized accounts of real cases or events[]

• The Magnificent Yankee, originally a play about the Supreme Court tenure of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was adapted to the screen in 1950, and made into a TV movie in 1965.
• Gideon's Trumpet (1980), a fictionalized account of the events of Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Supreme Court held that an indigent had the right to court-appointed counsel.
• Separate But Equal (1991), fictionalized account of the events of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.
• Amistad (1997), former Justice Harry Blackmun played the role of Justice Joseph Story in this fictionalized account of the real case, wherein the Court upheld the liberation of native Africans who had been kidnapped and brought to the United States after the importation of slaves had been prohibited.
• The People vs. Larry Flynt (1997), the film features a fictionalized portrayal of the real case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, in which the Court found that the First Amendment protected the right of Hustler Magazine to parody public figures, even if the parody caused emotional distress to the said figure.
• The 2000 made-for-TV movie, Nuremberg, while not depicting a U.S. Supreme Court case, has Alec Baldwin portraying Justice Robert H. Jackson, who had taken leave from the Supreme Court to serve as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials. The earlier film version, Judgment at Nuremberg, has a fictional character in that position.
• Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight, a 2013 television film for HBO, is a partly fictionalized depiction of the Supreme Court's deliberations in the case of Clay v. United States, in which the court threw out the criminal conviction of Muhammad Ali for refusing to report for induction into the United States military during the Vietnam War.
• Bridge of Spies (2015), depiction of Abel v. United States.
• Woman in Gold (2015), depiction of Republic of Austria v. Altmann.
• Loving (2016), depiction of Loving v. Virginia.
• The Post (2017), depicts the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States, in which the Court ruled that the New York Times and the Washington Post could continue to publish leaked government documents showing that the government knew the war in Vietnam to be unwinnable. Chief Justice Burger was portrayed by Mark Jacoby.
• On the Basis of Sex (2018), depiction of the circuit court ruling Moritz v. Commissioner, which the Supreme Court refused to take up. The final scene shows Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg climbing the steps of the Supreme Court building.

References[]