In a few weeks, the Supreme Court will end its term, leaving behind a trail of legal wreckage that has become all too familiar since the emergence of its conservative supermajority in 2020.

Although the headlines will focus on the specific casualties — most notably a crushing blow to the Voting Rights Act — the real story of this term is not what the court did, but why it felt so comfortable doing it.

We are witnessing the solidification of a sovereign court: an institution that has effectively decoupled itself from the traditional gravity of American checks and balances.

For decades, the court operated under a healthy, if unspoken, anxiety: the fear of reversal. This fear once acted as a structural brake, reminding the justices that if they strayed too far from the constitutional mainstream, the system would push back.

For instance, the 11th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 26th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Congress has reversed several decisions by passing statutes as well, as exemplified in the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. And the Supreme Court occasionally overrules itself, including overturning Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed states to criminalize same-sex sexual relations, in 2003.

But in our era of hyper-polarization and legislative paralysis, that fear has evaporated. The justices know that a gridlocked Congress cannot pass a corrective statute or propose a constitutional amendment. And the court’s conservative supermajority — which may last for decades — has little reason to fear reversal by a future court.

Without the fear of reversal, the law ceases to be a search for neutral principles and becomes something far more dangerous: a vehicle for the personal policy preferences of those who never have to answer for them.

To restore the court’s legitimacy, we must do more than simply add seats; we must change the fundamental math of judicial power. The goal should be to reintroduce the very thing the conservative supermajority has lost: the possibility of being corrected.

The most effective way to achieve this is a two-pronged structural reset. First, Congress should exercise its clear constitutional authority to expand the size of the court. Second, and more crucially, the justices should no longer sit as a permanent, monolithic body of nine. Instead, they should be required to hear cases in randomly assigned three-judge panels with final decision-making authority.

In this environment, the incentive structure for each justice shifts overnight. When justices knows their opinions are the final word for potentially decades to come, they are emboldened to be ideological revolutionaries. But when a justice knows that a radical or poorly reasoned opinion is likely to be overturned by a different panel just years later, the incentive shifts toward moderation and a renewed respect for precedent.

Coupled with a larger pool of justices appointed across multiple presidential administrations, this system would dilute the winner-take-all stakes of judicial appointments. It transforms the court from a partisan prize into a functional institution where the law is shaped by a diversity of perspectives, rather than the iron grip of a permanent majority.

And giving three-judge panels final decision-making authority, instead of enabling review by the full court, enhances the benefits of random panel assignment. It achieves this by removing the possibility that an ideological majority of the court gets the final say.

Critics may argue that abandoning the rule of nine would plunge American law into a state of permanent vertigo, with shifting panels creating a patchwork of contradictory rulings. But this concern ignores the reality of our current stability, which is less a settled peace than an ideological occupation.

In truth, a panel system creates a powerful new pressure for narrow rulings. Making the finality of any single decision more precarious, we incentivize justices to find the middle ground, crafting opinions modest enough to survive the scrutiny of their colleagues in subsequent cases. We trade a rigid, brittle certainty for a flexible, resilient consistency rooted in genuine consensus.

Enacting this reform is not a radical circumvention of the Constitution. Article III gives Congress broad authority to define the size and structure of the federal courts. Over the last 250 years, we have seen the size of the Supreme Court fluctuate from six members to 10. And Congress already requires that U.S. courts of appeals judges sit in three-judge panels, so that’s nothing new.

This is not a court-packing coup; it is a structural reset. It seeks a return to a system where the Supreme Court behaves as a functioning institution of law rather than a static council of ideological elders.

Ultimately, instilling a fear of reversal is an act of institutional humility. With public confidence at a historic low, we can no longer afford a court that is always right simply because it is final. We need a court that is final only when it is right.

Paul M. Collins, Jr. is a professor of Legal Studies and Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the coauthor of “Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings.”

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