Professor John Fabian Witt Takes First Look at Biden Years

Professor John Fabian Witt ’99 is among the leading historians offering a first look at Joseph R. Biden’s presidency in a new book.

Witt contributed a chapter to “The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment.” The book, edited by political historian Julian Zelizer and published by Princeton University Press, provides insights into how Biden fits within the broader historical forces shaping the U.S. in the 21st century. Essays assess major issues of his presidency including education, reproductive rights, the economy, labor relations, climate policy, race, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the culture wars.

The chapter by Witt, “Antagonists and Enablers: The Tragic Dance of Biden and the Supremes,” focuses on Biden’s unsuccessful 2024 proposal for U.S. Supreme Court reforms. Deemed “dead on arrival” by the Republican-controlled House, the proposal included term limits, an enforceable code of ethics for justices, and a constitutional amendment making clear that presidents are not immune from crimes committed while in office. The last item was a bid to reverse the Court’s decision, issued just two weeks before, that established broad presidential immunity. 

At the time, Witt recounts, Biden’s proposed reforms were read by sympathetic observers as a sign of antagonism between the president and the court. Witt doesn’t dispute this interpretation but says that focusing on the clash between the president and the court obscures a related story: “The two institutions have been mutually enabling as well adversarial,” he writes. 

According to Witt, acknowledging these two opposing but intertwined aspects of the Biden and Supreme Court relationship is critical to understanding the changing character of both the court and the presidency in the 21st century.

“The Biden years gave us an administration buoyed by the Court, or at least exploiting it for tactical advantage alongside a Court whose own authority has been strengthened by the yawning gap between vast executive responsibilities and ambitions on the one hand and slim political capital in Congress on the other,” Witt writes.

Witt's chapter draws on David Boies Professor of Law Keith E. Whittington’s work on the political construction of judicial supremacy and Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver’s work on affirmative action after SFFA v. Harvard.

In addition to Witt, Yale Law School alumni contributing to the book are Noah A. Rosenblum ’17, associate professor of law at New York University. Rosenblum wrote the chapter “Between the Nightmare and the Noble Dream: The Ideal of Department of Justice Independence in a Time of Hyperpartisanship.”

Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University, where he teaches and writes on the history of American law and the law of torts. He is the author of six books of legal history, including most recently “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America” (2025).  His book “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History” won the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was awarded the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book.