From juries to justices, America's courtrooms are seeing a decline in civility

America’s political and cultural divisions are increasingly finding their way into the nation’s courtrooms. From bitter jury-room disputes to unusually public clashes among Supreme Court justices, the judiciary – long considered the most restrained and deliberate of America’s institutions – is beginning to reflect the same polarization reshaping much of American public life. 

Courts were once the federal branch of government least likely to generate headlines for hot tempers or personal attacks. Increasingly, they are starting to look like everything else.

A Warning Sign From the Jury Box

A recent Wall Street Journal report by Corinne Ramey offers a striking introduction to the problem. 

Trial lawyers, jury consultants and courtroom observers are witnessing growing levels of hostility, distrust, and dysfunction among jurors across the country. Deliberations once viewed as difficult but manageable exercises in compromise are, in some cases, devolving into shouting matches, accusations of misconduct, personal threats, and complete breakdowns in consensus.

At the center of the Journal’s story is a Florida opioid lawsuit involving CVS, Walmart and Walgreens. Jurors deliberating the case reportedly endured two weeks of intense conflict – accusing one another of refusing to follow the law, ripping up presentation materials, improperly conducting outside research using artificial intelligence and even secretly communicating with attorneys. 

One juror described the atmosphere as “relentless arguing,” while another compared the experience to the classic courtroom drama 12 Angry Men – except without the eventual reconciliation.

Jury consultants and attorneys increasingly believe these incidents are not isolated episodes, but symptoms of a broader societal fracture. 

Consultant Laurie Kuslansky told the Journal that “whatever you see in society at large you see in the jury deliberation room,” pointing to pandemic-era isolation and widening political polarization as forces making compromise and consensus more difficult. 

Survey data collected by law firm Orrick and trial consultant J. Lee Meihls underscores the concern: 57% of surveyed Americans in 2025 said they distrusted the U.S. justice system, while 65% said they would follow personal beliefs or conscience over the law or a judge’s instructions.

The data from the jury box is significant on its own. But it takes on a different dimension when viewed alongside what has been happening at the very top of the American judicial system.

The Supreme Court: A Bench Divided

For most of American history, the Supreme Court projected an image – however imperfect – of cool institutional detachment. Justices disagreed, sometimes sharply, but their public conduct largely adhered to norms of collegial restraint. Dissents were legal arguments, not personal broadsides. Public remarks were measured. The court’s decorum, in other words, was part of its authority.

That image has eroded considerably.

Over the past several years, Supreme Court justices have engaged in exchanges that would have been essentially unthinkable in earlier eras – pointed personal critiques embedded in opinions, accusations of bad faith and ideological blindness and rare public confrontations that spill beyond the walls of the Court itself. 

What was once a hallmark of restrained institutional decorum now frequently includes attacks that sound less like legal reasoning and more like the rhetoric of the broader culture war.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been among the most direct. 

In a series of notable dissents, she has accused her conservative colleagues of favoring “moneyed interests” over ordinary Americans, characterized certain rulings as reflecting a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to racial inequality and warned that the high court’s direction risks the nation’s “collective demise.” 

The statements are not mere policy disagreements dressed in legal language – they are accusations about the character and motivations of her fellow justices.

Conservative justices have responded in kind. I

n the landmark 2023 affirmative action case, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a direct rebuttal to Justice Jackson’s arguments, asserting that “[a]s she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today.” 

Observers on both sides of the ideological divide described his response as unusually sharp.

The friction has extended beyond written opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor drew significant attention – and criticism –after remarks at a public appearance in which she suggested Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s background made him out of touch with working-class realities in an immigration enforcement case. 

The comments were pointed enough that Sotomayor later issued a rare and formal public apology, describing her words as “inappropriate” and “hurtful” and confirming she had apologized to Kavanaugh directly. That a sitting Supreme Court justice felt compelled to publicly apologize to a colleague is itself a remarkable marker of how far the court’s internal culture has shifted.

Nor are these dynamics entirely new. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 and the subsequent confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett intensified an already charged atmosphere. The leak of the draft Dobbs opinion in 2022 – an extraordinary breach of court confidentiality – further damaged the sense of institutional solidarity. The period since has seen a cascade of ethics controversies, emergency rulings on politically charged questions and a steady stream of public criticism from justices aimed not just at legal outcomes but at the legitimacy of the institution itself.

Sharp dissents that once remained largely confined to legal reasoning now often include pointed criticism about judicial ethics, institutional integrity and ideological capture. In this sense, the court appears to have begun to mirror the very political culture it was designed to stand apart from.

The Consequences Downstream

The tone set at the nation’s highest court has not appeared to stay there. It appears to have filtered through the legal culture, signaling to lawyers, lower court judges and the public what kind of conduct is now considered acceptable within the justice system.

The consequences are already appearing in high-profile trials. Disputes during Harvey Weinstein’s retrial saw jurors complain about intimidation, personal attacks and fear for their own safety. 

In a fraud case involving cryptocurrency executives, jurors reportedly broke down emotionally during deliberations, some struggling to separate legal analysis from anguish over the severe prison sentences defendants might face. 

These are not ordinary signs of deliberative difficulty. They apperar to reflect something more fundamental: a public that increasingly brings its divisions, its distrust, and its grievances into civic institutions that depend on shared norms to function.

A Different Kind of Institution – Until Now

Historically, juries – and by extension, the appellate courts that review their work – were romanticized as one of the last places in which Americans from different walks of life could come together in pursuit of a common civic purpose. The jury box, like the Supreme Court bench, represented not only justice but democratic participation, compromise, and reasoned debate. Courts were where argument was supposed to be disciplined by rules, where emotion was supposed to yield to evidence and where disagreement was supposed to produce resolution rather than entrenchment.

What made courts distinctive was precisely that they did not look like the rest of American political and cultural life. They were slower, more formal, more committed to procedure. That distinctiveness now appears under pressure from both ends of the system: from jurors who bring the ambient hostility of the culture into the deliberation room, and from justices who increasingly express themselves in ways indistinguishable from partisan combatants.

To be sure, fierce disagreements are not new. American courtrooms have always reflected the tensions of the society around them. But the frequency and intensity now on display – across jury rooms and Supreme Court opinions alike –raise uncomfortable questions about whether something deeper is changing.

If citizens and their highest judicial officers increasingly distrust institutions, reject shared standards of evidence and decorum and view opposing viewpoints not merely as wrong but as illegitimate or dangerous, the consequences could ripple through every level of the justice system.

The American legal system ultimately depends not only on laws and judges, but on a public and institutional willingness to engage in good-faith disagreement. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on juries, viewed alongside the increasingly combative dynamics at the Supreme Court, suggests that willingness is under real strain.