Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take In the coming months, the Supreme Court is likely to release decisions in a number of cases that will fundamentally impact the lives of millions. But we don’t need to wait until nine elite lawyers in robes weigh in to know some basics about our rights and freedoms here in the US.

For example, we know that stripping people born in the United States of their citizenship, as the Trump administration has proposed doing, is unconstitutional. It’s right there in the Fourteenth Amendment: All persons born in the United States “are citizens of the United States.” You don’t need to be a Supreme Court justice to understand what that means. You don’t even need a law degree to know without a doubt that the Constitution makes it clear that people born in the United States are citizens from birth.

You also don’t need to be a lawyer to say that the separation of church and state guaranteed by the First Amendment means that parents shouldn’t be able to use their religion to justify banning books from schools with LGBTQ+ characters. And you don’t need any specialized training to know that when the Constitution says all people are entitled to “equal protection under the law,” that should apply to trans people, who should not be denied health care based on their gender identity. In the United States, we’re all governed by the 7,591 words in the Constitution and its amendments.

But who decides what those words mean? The answer is us. We, the people, decide what the Constitution means and when it’s being violated.

This might not be what you were taught in school, where most of us were told that interpreting the Constitution is the exclusive job of judges and the Supreme Court justices. That’s because Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, have largely embraced the idea of judicial supremacy: that judges are the ultimate authority when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. Under that view, the law is what judges say it is, leaving the people with almost no role at all in making meaning of the law.

Letting judges and justices take exclusive control of interpreting the Constitution hasn’t worked out well for most of us. Historically, white men have dominated the judiciary. And while it actually isn’t a requirement that federal judges have law degrees, the last time a Supreme Court Justice was appointed without having attended law school was 1941.

This matters because people who go to law school are disproportionately wealthy: a study by UCLA law professor Richard Sander found that 2% of law students come from the poorest quarter of American families, while 75% come from the richest quarter. The result of this unrepresentative judiciary is centuries of decision-making that have not served the people well. In just the last few years, the Supreme Court has decided the Constitution doesn’t protect the right to abortion but does hold that guns should be easily accessible in our communities and that states can change their voting laws in ways that disproportionately impact Black voters and voters of color.

As Harvard Law professor Niko Bowie summarizes it: People say that federal courts are critical for protecting the rights of minorities, but the truth is that throughout American history, “the principal ‘minority’ most often protected by the Court is the wealthy.”