The Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariff program in February 2026, and the coverage split almost immediately into two lanes: trade-policy mechanics and constitutional drama. Both are legitimate. But the third lane, the one asking what the Court's own institutional history looks like when it decides who holds power and who doesn't, has mostly gone undriven. Ian Millhiser's 'Injustices' occupies that lane with considerable evidence and some pointed conclusions. The ruling doesn't become less significant through that lens. It becomes harder to read as simply as the headlines suggest.
The ruling against Trump's Section 122 tariff authority has generated the explainers you'd expect: what the Trade Act of 1974 actually authorizes, how the major-questions doctrine applies, what Congress did or did not delegate. Those are real questions with real answers. What's harder to find is the longer view, the one that asks not just whether this particular executive overstepped but what the Court's institutional pattern looks like across time, specifically when it has chosen to check executive power and when it has not. Constitutional history tends to get treated as either settled background or specialist territory. 'Injustices' is one of the few books willing to work in the space between those two defaults.
Millhiser starts from a deliberately uncomfortable premise: that the Supreme Court, far from being the counter-majoritarian check on power it is often celebrated as, has functioned for most of American history as a reliable ally of whoever already held economic and political advantage. He builds that argument not through abstract constitutional theory but through the actual cases, the actual people who brought them, and what happened to those people afterward. The book moves through American history in roughly chronological order, but the organizing logic is pattern rather than chronology.
You see the Court dismantling the Reconstruction amendments almost immediately after ratification, enabling the legal architecture of Jim Crow while presenting the work as neutral textual interpretation. You see it protecting child labor, blocking early workplace safety law, and functioning, in Millhiser's framing, as the enforcement arm of a vision of property rights that consistently served employers over workers and owners over the owned. The counterlens worth applying is that Millhiser is writing as an advocate, not a detached historian, and he's transparent enough about that to let you calibrate accordingly.
This is an indictment, as the subtitle makes clear, not a survey. Certain periods and rulings that complicate the thesis, moments when the Court genuinely expanded rights in ways that cost powerful interests, receive less sustained attention than the cases that support his argument. Whether that's a flaw or simply the honest shape of a prosecutorial history depends on what you came to the book expecting. What makes 'Injustices' particularly useful for this moment is the thread concerning executive power and the Court's deference patterns. The history Millhiser traces suggests that the Court's willingness to check executive authority has never been ideologically consistent; it has tracked more closely with which interests a given exercise of executive power was protecting or threatening. Applying that lens to a ruling that limits presidential tariff authority doesn't produce a simple conclusion, but it produces better questions than most of the current coverage is asking. The new epilogue extends the argument into the modern Court's record on voting rights and campaign finance. That material stands on its own, and it also connects to a broader question the tariff story raises: what institutional legitimacy means when the institution's history is as contested as Millhiser makes the case that it is.
Think about the conversation that follows a ruling like this one. Someone argues the Court is doing its job, checking executive overreach exactly as constitutional design intends. Someone else says the Court is selectively activist, intervening when it suits a particular ideological coalition. Both arguments usually stall because neither side has much historical timeline to work with beyond the last decade or two. 'Injustices' is most useful precisely at that stall point, not as a conversation-ender but as a source of historical texture that reframes the question. If you've absorbed Millhiser's argument, even partially, you stop asking only whether Trump exceeded his statutory authority under the Trade Act and start asking what the Court's intervention pattern looks like across a longer stretch of time, who has historically benefited from judicial review of executive power, and whether the February 2026 ruling fits or disrupts that pattern. Those questions are harder. They're also the ones that hold up past the next news cycle.
If the February ruling has you thinking about constitutional limits on executive power in more than a passing way, 'Injustices' offers something the coverage cannot: a historical argument you can test against what you already know, push back on where it overstates, and use as a frame for whatever this Court does next. It won't give you a clean verdict on the tariff ruling. It will almost certainly change the questions you bring to it.