Talk:Supreme Court of the United States in fiction

Should we mention Loving (2016 film)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Derhuerst (talk • contribs) 20:58, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Unsourced

Moving unsourced examples to talk. BD2412 T 01:58, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

TV

• In the 1992 The Simpsons episode, "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", Bart Simpson is shown as ultimately becoming Chief Justice of the United States.
• Recount is a 2008 movie depicting the Florida election recount at the end of the 2000 Presidential Election in the United States. At the end of the movie, actors who looked like attorney David Boies, attorney Theodore Olson, and the nine justices sitting on the Supreme Court in 2000 reenacted key sections from oral argument of Bush v. Gore. Two actors read sections of opinions written by Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens.

• In Homeland (Season 7), President Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel)'s decision to fire four members of her cabinet to prevent them from invoking the 25th Amendment is challenged in the Supreme Court, who reject her dismissal of the secretaries as an illegal act and thus allow the 25th Amendment to be invoked and her to be temporarily replaced in office by Vice President Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges).
• Designated Survivor (Season 2) features Chief Justice Peter Koemann (Keith Dinicol) in the season finale, who confronts President Tom Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) about his Chief of Staff trying to influence the decisions of the court in relation to potential criminal charges being brought against him.
• Salvation (Season 2) features the Supreme Court deciding in a case between President Pauline Mackenzie (Tovah Feldshuh) and the treacherous former Vice President/Acting President Monroe Bennett (Sasha Roiz), with Bennett arguing that his removal from office and Mackenzie's reinstatement was illegal and unconstitutional. However, when the court is deadlocked 4-4 and the tiebreaker Chief Justice Martin Cheng (Hiro Kanagawa) is still deliberating, a blackmailed court clerk detonates a suicide vest in the building, seriously injuring Cheng and causing moderate injuries to the other judges. As riots break out in Washington, DC between supporters of Bennett and Mackenzie, Cheng is woken from a medically induced coma and is able to release his decision, rendering the case 5-4 in favour of Pauline Mackenzie. Another named justice is Associate Justice Praeger (Corina Akeson).
• Shooter (Season 3) features a significant subplot regarding the Supreme Court. A secretive cabal known as Atlas operating within the government pressures President Alvarez (Benito Martinez) to nominate appellate judge and former Attorney General of Utah Ray Brooks (Michael O'Neill) to fill the vacant seat of Chief Justice, which would allow him to act as their swing vote in decisions for decades to come. However, when Brooks commits suicide due to atrocities he took part in during the Vietnam War, the President refuses to nominate a replacement recommended by the group, and decides to work towards taking them out. Having needed Brooks swing vote in an upcoming case, the group tries and fails to assassinate Associate Justice Gibson (Rhea Perlman) to swing the vote 4-3 in their favour, bombing the Supreme Court building as a distraction and attempting to use a suicide bomber to kill the evacuated justices at a safehouse in Arlington, Virginia. Other named justices include Associate Justice Ramiro Dominguez (Castulo Guerra) and Associate Justice Stewart.
• Y: The Last Man (Season 1) briefly mentions three surviving female justices of the Supreme Court after an unexplained event causes all male mammals with a Y chromosome to die globally. They are Associate Justice Nadine Gwynther, Associate Justice Dina Corrette and Associate Justice Orania Landrith. After the event, dubbed the "global die off", they are the three highest ranking people in the judicial system of the United States.

Film

Fictional depictions

• The Pelican Brief, a 1993 feature film in which a major plot point is the assassination of two fictional Supreme Court Justices, Rosenberg and Jensen.
• Swing Vote, is a 1999 TV movie in which the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Roe vs. Wade decision and thrown the issue of abortion rights back to the individual states. Alabama has subsequently outlawed abortion, and prosecutes for first degree murder when a woman terminates her pregnancy. Newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Joseph Kirkland (Andy García) will turn out to be the deciding vote in a case that could reinstate a woman's right to choose but Kirkland finds himself surrounded by proponents of both the pro-choice and pro-life agendas, with his fellow justices, his secretary and even his wife trying to influence his vote. Other fictional justices portrayed in the film are: The Chief Justice (Robert Prosky)); Justice Clore Cawley (Ray Walston); Justice Will Dunn (Harry Belafonte); Justice Daniel Morissey (James Whitmore); Justice Sara Marie Brandwynne (Kate Nelligan); Justice Hank Banks (Albert Hall); Justice Eli MacCorckle (Bob Balaban); Justice Benjamin "Rip" Ripley (John Aylward), and retired Justice Harlan Greene (Milo O'Shea).
• In the 2002 Steven Seagal movie Half Past Dead, Linda Thorson plays Supreme Court Justice June McPherson, who must be rescued after being kidnapped by terrorists while attending the execution of a killer whom she had previously sentenced to death.
• In the 2006 film, Idiocracy, after 500 years of dumbing down, the United States has replaced the Supreme Court with the "Extreme Court", which sentences the protagonist of the film to a "rehabilitation" death match.

Fictionalized accounts of real cases or events

• The Magnificent Yankee, originally a play about the Supreme Court tenure of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was adapted to the screen in 1950, and made into a TV movie in 1965.
• Amistad (1997), former Justice Harry Blackmun played the role of Justice Joseph Story in this fictionalized account of the real case, wherein the Court upheld the liberation of native Africans who had been kidnapped and brought to the United States after the importation of slaves had been prohibited.
• The 2000 made-for-TV movie, Nuremberg, while not depicting a U.S. Supreme Court case, has Alec Baldwin portraying Justice Robert H. Jackson, who had taken leave from the Supreme Court to serve as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials. The earlier film version, Judgment at Nuremberg, has a fictional character in that position.
• Bridge of Spies (2015), depiction of Abel v. United States.
• Woman in Gold (2015), depiction of Republic of Austria v. Altmann.
• The Post (2017), depicts the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States, in which the Court ruled that the New York Times and the Washington Post could continue to publish leaked government documents showing that the government knew the war in Vietnam to be unwinnable. Chief Justice Burger was portrayed by Mark Jacoby.

References