Bolts From the Blue: Thomas Sowell and the Court | The American Spectator

In the June 2025 Supreme Court ruling, Trump v. CASA, Inc., the court held that “because universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts, the court grants the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions.” Several of President Trump’s executive orders had been put on hold by District Court judges through their use of these universal injunctions. Recognizing the rapid rise of universal injunctions in recent years, the Supreme Court’s ruling limits the scope and application of these injunctions.

Responding to the dissent of Justice Jackson, the opinion of the Court, authored by Justice Barrett, took a firm stance against Justice Jackson, stating that “she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent de­fender of judicial supremacy blush.” The opinion goes on:

Because analyz­ing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” post, at 3, [JUSTICE JACKSON] seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enor­mous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” Ibid. In other words, it is unecessary [sic] to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what mat­ters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admoni­tion: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too.

These statements from Justice Barrett remind me of the brilliant essay from economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell titled, The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution. In a short section of the essay, Sowell makes the case that judges have strayed from their Constitutionally-granted roles, and instead have become much too powerful “roving second-guessers” who “strike like a bolt from the blue.” Justice Barrett would agree that judges must have constrained power, too, as her opinion argued that “JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Contrasting traditional justice with cosmic justice, Sowell argues that cosmic justice “is incompatible with the rule of law and the freedom which depends on that rule.” Cosmic justice includes social justice, but takes it a step further by seeking to create a world in which outcomes and results of people are equal — a world in which we play god until we get to see no disparity and no difference between people anywhere ever. Contrary to traditional justice, Sowell notes that cosmic justice rejects rules, ignores costs, and disregards processes.

Sowell contends that judges drift toward — and in many cases, are fully on board with — cosmic justice in multiple ways. How much power judges believe they have is one way. Sowell noted,

The difference between cosmic justice and traditional justice means a huge difference in the power of judges. Under cosmic justice, the judge’s role is to decide whether the behavior of each of the parties fits the judge’s notions of what they should have done. Under traditional justice, the judge decides the much narrower question as to what each party had a right to do, at that party’s own discretion, under existing laws and agreements.

Just like Justice Barrett, who stated that Justice Jackson wants an “imperial Judiciary,” Sowell notes that limited and narrower power is what allows judges to uphold the rule of law, because they are constrained to follow it just like everyone else. Judges are not to use the “law as an ‘agent of change’ …. heedless by their exalted sense of moral superiority.”

Sowell also argued that it is not the judges’ role to place justice, compassion, and equality into the law to make it more aligned “with the judges’ own perceptions of social realities.” Sowell does not discount those virtues, but instead argues that if the rule of law is to be preserved, the legislature must be the one responsible for inserting those virtues into the law. Even if a judge is correct that certain laws could use a bit more of these virtues then the laws currently possess, the judge will heavily degrade the rule of law by inserting those virtues into the law, because the rule of law relies on the “separation of roles in creating law” and in “apply[ing] the law.”

Retelling an interaction between Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge Learned Hand, Sowell notes how Hand told Holmes to “Do justice,” for which Holmes responded, “That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law.” In certain instances, we may prefer that judges “do justice” by making laws more just. But in doing so, these judges subvert the rule of law itself, no matter how “just” they make particular laws. As Sowell reminded us throughout his writings, one must understand that the costs of some decisions may far outweigh the upsides of that decision.

Sowell ultimately believed that the “quest for cosmic justice via the judiciary … is one of the most dangerous … threat[s] to the freedom of Americans.” If Sowell is correct, we can be thankful that Trump v. CASA, Inc. turned out the way it did, where the Supreme Court reminded itself that even they are not above the law. At least for now, the rule of law avoided a bolt from the blue.

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