American Thinker quotes Professor Michael McConnell on the way that academic thought on judicial supremacy has evolved since the Constitution was written.

Basic questions about our government, and how it functions, and its legitimacy are in the news daily. The Supreme Court’s latest term came to an end in June — as they often do — with a bang, with important decisions on same-sex marriage, the preservation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), housing policy, and the death penalty.

Yet, public opinion data regularly show that Americans don’t understand the Supreme Court, or how it works, or the decisions it makes (e.g., Pew July 2010 poll).

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The notion of “judicial supremacy” is contrary to the framers’ understanding of the judicial role. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78: “to avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” As Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell has observed, “No one at the founding appeared to take the now popular academic view that the Constitution was deliberately framed in terms of heroic generalities precisely to give federal judges a wider scope for discretion.”