The American court system is quietly rewarding the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and nobody in power seems interested in stopping it.
Consider what happens when a judge or justice makes a decision that garners national attention. They don't face consequences for partisan reasoning or institutional capture. Instead, they face something far more valuable: relevance. Media coverage. Think tank invitations. Book deals waiting in the wings. The incentive structure isn't designed to punish bad judicial reasoning; it's designed to amplify it.
This matters more than most realize because courts have become the real legislative branch in America. When Congress gridlocks, parties turn to judges to settle disputes they can't resolve through democratic processes. That shift in power creates a perverse incentive for judges to act more like political actors than neutral arbiters. And the system rewards them handsomely for doing so.
Look at how high-profile court decisions get processed through our media ecosystem. A ruling that clearly favors one political side gets celebrated by that side's media apparatus and condemned by the other. The judge or justice becomes a figure of consequence. They're praised as "bold" or "principled" by allies, even when their reasoning is thin. Critics hurl accusations. Books get written. Speaking fees materialize.
Meanwhile, a judge who carefully reasons through a technical issue in property law, writes a thorough opinion that settles an important question fairly, and then fades into appropriate obscurity? They get nothing. No book tour. No cable news appearances. No foundation board seats. Their judicial competence goes largely unrewarded by the systems that distribute prestige and opportunity.
This creates a selection bias at the appellate and Supreme Court levels. The judges who rise to prominence are often those willing to make splashy decisions that attract attention. Not necessarily those most suited to judicial restraint or institutional stewardship.
The second-order effects are even more troubling. Young lawyers looking to advance their careers notice which kinds of judicial decision-making get rewarded. Law school professors see which legal arguments attract attention. Litigants and advocacy groups recognize that appeals courts aren't purely neutral forums anymore; they're stages where larger cultural battles get performed. Everyone downstream adjusts their behavior accordingly.
When parties bring cases to court, they're increasingly betting on getting judges who will rule their way, not on the merits of their case. That's rational behavior in a system that has stopped pretending neutrality is the goal.
The problem isn't that individual judges are necessarily corrupt or that any particular decision was obviously wrong. It's systemic. The incentive architecture of American courts now encourages exactly the kind of behavior that undermines judicial legitimacy: treating judgeships as positions of political consequence rather than neutral dispute resolution.
Some recent judicial controversies make this visible if you know where to look. When courts make decisions that generate national outrage, supporters and opponents both treat the outcome as evidence of the judge's true beliefs rather than as an interpretation of law. That framing is only possible if we've collectively accepted that judges are political actors. And we've accepted that partly because the reward structure makes it so.
What's the alternative? Higher barriers to judicial publicity. Stricter norms against judges pursuing book deals or speaking fees. Career incentives that reward careful reasoning over flashy decisions. Structural changes to reduce the political stakes of individual court decisions. None of this is currently happening.
The judiciary remains one of the last institutions where Americans still expect some baseline of impartiality. That expectation is collapsing not because judges are uniquely corrupt, but because the system increasingly rewards the opposite of impartiality.
Until that incentive structure changes, courts will keep producing decisions that serve institutional interests rather than justice. And we'll keep calling it law.