Unpacking the Supreme Court

First, check out the Federalist Society

With polls showing public confidence in the Supreme Court at all-time lows, President Joe Biden  has proposed 18-year limits for Supreme Court justices.  Don’t expect it to go  anywhere anytime soon. Retiring or triumphant presidents often indulge their imaginations. . 

The same problem was at the heart of  Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal of 1937. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 would have permitted the president to add an additional justice to the nine-member court for each justice over the age of Seventy, with a cap of fifteen members on the Court. That proposal went nowhere, too.

In this case, changes of norms have created a crisis of confidence. What are norms? The standards of behavior within a particular group. Who fashions norms in the legal profession?  Judges, with their decisions; senators, who confirm or deny nominations; and legal scholars, who critique the decisions.

The current controversy stems from  a forty-year feud t between two large and powerful actions among these practitioners. Formerly norms were fashioned mainly within the  Big Tent of opinion maintained by  the American Bar Association. In 1984. a band of conservative dissidents, worried that the judiciary has been captured by liberal opinion, formed the Federalist Society

If you  want to know more about the  brouhaha that has developed over the course of these last forty years, read this penetrating (and very long) examination by a team of a ProPublica journalists.  As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”