The arrest of an armed man outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh marks a significant milestone in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now that the justices and their families need permanent, professional and close security, as they unquestionably do, there will be no going back. The court building at One First St. NE will continue its transformation into a garrisoned fortress, not the marble palace of the people’s justice it was built to be.

This now inevitable development isn’t just bad for the justices. It’s bad for democracy. And it’s terrible for the rule of law, which benefits when the justices can do their jobs with a minimum of spillover into their personal lives.

For more than 200 years, the justices have mostly lived charmed lives, at least from the standpoint of high government officials. From John Marshall through Thurgood Marshall and up to the present day, there has been only one recorded attempt to kill a justice, in 1889 (Justice Stephen Johnson Field’s bodyguard, a U.S. marshal, killed the assailant). Someone shot a bullet through a window into Justice Harry Blackmun’s chambers in 1985; no one was injured.

The man outside Kavanaugh’s home who was charged with attempted murder was, among other things, reportedly incensed about the Supreme Court’s impending reversal of Roe v. Wade and with it the federal right to abortion. Just as resistance to Roe engendered murderous attacks on abortion doctors and clinics over the decades, its reversal might inflame passions to an extent we can’t yet anticipate.

Of course, the justices should be able to make decisions without their lives being threatened. Liberals who believe in the rule of law will not play down those threats. The liberal justices are going to need protection just as much as the conservatives.

National craziness has consequences in a highly polarized country in which the Capitol can be stormed and would-be shooters can’t be tracked, let alone disarmed, because of the limits of existing gun regulations.

In 2021, more than 4,500 threats and other inappropriate communications were directed at federal judges, according to the head of the U.S. Marshals Service. In 2020, a gunman with a grudge attacked the home of federal judge Esther Salas in New Jersey, killing her son and seriously injuring her husband. Just last week in Wisconsin, a gunman with several politicians on his target list killed a retired judge who had sentenced him years earlier.

Gone are the days when Supreme Court justices avoided the negativity that most public officials must sometimes confront — when they could walk the streets alone or with their families without attracting attention, positive or negative.

That served the country. It lowered the temperature for even the court’s high-profile rulings. Today’s feverish atmosphere is unusual, but the consequences for how the justices live will be permanent.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and a professor of law at Harvard University.