Pack the Court!: A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion

Description

The United States Supreme Court has numbered nine justices for the past 150 years. But that number is not fixed. With the Democrats controlling the House and Senate during the Biden presidency, they could add justices to the Supreme Court. But would court packing destroy the Court as an apolitical judicial institution? This is the crucial question Stephen Feldman addresses in his provocative book, Pack the Court! He uses a historical, analytical, and political argument to justify court-packing in general and Democratic court-packing more specifically. Republicans and Democrats alike profess to worry that court-packing will destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial institution by injecting politics into a purely legal adjudicative process. But as Feldman’s insightful book shows, law and politics are forever connected in judicial interpretation and decision making. Pack the Court! insists that court packing is not the threat to the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy that many fear. Given this, Feldman argues that Democrats should pack the Court while they have the opportunity. Doing so might even strengthen the American people’s faith in the Court. Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Court-Packing Controversy 2. The Size of the Supreme Court: A History 3. FDR's Court-Packing Plan Republican Democracy Pluralist Democracy 4. The History of the Law-Politics Dichotomy 5. The Myth of the Law-Politics Dichotomy (or, Understanding the Law-Politics Dynamic) The Purists A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That An Emulsion Understanding Legal Interpretation: The Law-Politics Dynamic 6. Implications of the Law-Politics Dynamic For Supreme Court Justices For Politicians, Commentators, and Citizens For Scholars 7. The Roberts Court's Conservatism Judicial Denigration of Democratic Government Judicial Protection of Wealth and the Economic Marketplace Lack of Judicial Protection for Women Judicial Protection for Whites, Not People of Color Judicial Protection of Christianity Counterexamples: How Conservative Is the Roberts Court? 8. Conclusion: Court Packing and Supreme Court Legitimacy Notes Index