magisterial

But Roberts has either developed a tin ear when it comes to public opinion, or—more worrying still—he has not just “frozen out” the liberal justices, as Kantor and Liptak put it last month, but has actually frozen out any feedback or media sources that might have warned him that the public mood was not going to be welcoming of near-blanket immunity from a coup-fomenting president, even if that decision came trussed up in magisterial language about the separation of powers and the safeguarding of the “unitary executive.”

I give her a magisterial stare over the top of my reading glasses.

Compared with Pacino’s outraged and outrageous Cohn, spraying a vulgarian’s spittle across Nichols’ magisterial “Angels,” Strong’s performance is a model of white-knuckle control, swaggering when Cohn exerts his power, wilting when he can’t.

Dahlia Lithwick: I think one of the most fascinating pieces of reporting from the New York Times was the chief justice’s own conviction that if he could write the immunity opinion in some kind of lofty magisterial way, the public would say, “Oh yeah, this is obviously correct.”

It’s been 50 years since the publication of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of New York City master builder Robert Moses.