Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/appellate_advocacy/united-states-supreme-court/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 22:55:18+00:00

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Would the Supreme Court Be Better with More Justices?
Tinkering around with the American governmental structure has become a standard plank for campaigners during run-ups to elections. The latest structural idea some are revisiting is the number of judges on the Supreme Court. George Washington University law professor Johnathan Turley has a laid out a plan to increase the Court to nineteen.
Turley describes this increase not as court-packing but as a cure to the partisan lock that has become fairly predictable. With more justices, this lock would be eased and the "swing-vote" would not hold so much power in close cases. Turley says the Court may still split but the swing vote would probably not be the same justice every time. In some instances, we have become accustomed to cynically saying that arguments before the Court only have to persuade one person - most recently that person was Justice Anthony Kennedy - since the other justices were so predictable. When viewed from this perspective, it does seem a circumvention of justice when one person can hold so much sway over the decisions of the Court.
Turley makes the point that the number of justices on the Supreme Court is not mandated by the Constitution. The reason we have nine today is because there were nine circuits in 1869, and that's where it has stayed for no real reason except tradition. Turley would increase the Court to nineteen, and two justices would sit on the lower courts each year in order to keep in touch with reality (Turley says "so they don’t lose touch with judging in the litigation brawl that precedes a case that rises to the Supreme Court"). In the build up to fully staff the Court, each president would not be allowed to appoint more than two justices during his entire term. Turley arrives at the number nineteen because he says that is the size of most of our appellate courts and they work well when sitting en banc.
Glenn Reynolds, University of Tennessee law professor, agrees with increasing the Court, but actually advocates for a mega-court of fifty-nine judges! He says keep the nine already presiding, appointed by the president, and add one for every state, appointed by the state governor. Reynolds says this will allow for a more diverse bench and one not as subject to the political winds as is the smaller insular group of nine. Reynolds has also advocated for elections for the justices. He says that the Court has already become politicized, so elections to ten year terms would make the presidential election turn less on Supreme Court appointments. Several states already elect their supreme court judges (most recently Wisconsin).
Personally I remain sentimental and tend to be attached to tradition, so am not immediately interested in these proposals. But admittedly, as Turley notes, our Supreme Court is the smallest of any major nation, and the ideological lock is a real concern. Since there are no Constitutional rules about the size of the Court, and it would be only engrained practice that would need changing, revisiting the size of the Court may be an idea whose time has come.
The official U.S. Reports versions of Supreme Court opinions have been online for a long time. Seriously: all you need to do is cruise over to the Library of Congress's site, do some scrolling and some clicking to hunt down the volume you need, then do some more clicking and some more scrolling to get to case you need. Or, for relatively recent cases, you can go to the Supreme Court's site and do a slightly less elaborate click-and-scroll dance.
It's as tedious as it sounds.
That's why I'm celebrating scotuslink.com, a nifty little online service from Orin Kerr and a dev who goes by the Twitter handle of birds five underscores (@birds_____). The concept is simple: you go to the site, plug in the U.S. Reports citation, and get routed to a PDF copy of the case. The service generates the snarly URI required to get where you need to go in the LoC or SCOTUS catalogs. No searching or scrolling required. I've found it a big time/aggravation-saver for cite-checking and for diving into oldies like Chisholm v. Georgia.
A nice bonus: the design and code are great: simple, clean, and thoughtful.
The Kavanaugh hearings are entering their third day. The place to be to receive thoughtful commentary on Supreme Court happenings is SCOTUSblog. They will be live blogging today's confirmation hearings starting shortly after 9 am eastern. You can find the live stream here. The commentary found on SCOTUSblog is always well balanced if not entirely objective. But even posts that contain a specific point of view do so in a serious, transparent, and respectful way. This is in contrast to how most of us receive our news today. We have to sort through lots of superficial explicit and implicit bias. Some bias is easy to see, some not so much. It's a really unfortunate state of affairs.
There is a surprising contrast to the commentary on the hearings and the facts behind the nominee's voting record. The interesting fact that emerged from the hearings yesterday was how frequently Judge Kavanaugh's opinion aligned with Judge Merrick Garland's opinion. Garland was President Obama's nominee following the passing of Justice Scalia. Judge Garland's nomination was not taken up by the Republican Senate in the election year, so there was no chance for public debate as Kavanaugh is now experiencing. The somewhat shocking statistic is that Judge Garland and Judge Kavanaugh, who both sit on the D.C. Circuit Court, actually voted together 93% of the time: "Judge Garland joined 27 out of 28 opinions written by Judge Kavanaugh, while Judge Kavanaugh joined 28 out of 30 of Judge Garland’s rulings." Each judge was nominated by an opposing political party, and yet the large majority of their opinions are in congruence with each other.
The existence of that fact is bit astonishing when compared to the partisan debates we hear from our news sources. More than anything it appears to show that our appellate court judges work hard to find consensus and perhaps our judicial system is not in as much peril as we are sometimes cajoled into believing.
The Supreme Court & Stare Decisis: What Difference Can One Justice Make?
This is my second post in what I hope will be a series about overruling & the Supreme Court.
As we hurdle toward confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, public discourse has continued to center on stare decisis: will the post-Kennedy Roberts Court undo significant chunks of precedent.
If it did, this would mark a change for the Roberts Court. As I mentioned in my last post—and as Jonathan Adler discusses more fully at the Volokh Conspiracy—the Roberts Court has overruled precedent less frequently than its predecessors.1 The slowdown began in the 2007 term, the first in 50 years where the Court didn’t overrule a single precedent. From the 2007 term through the 2016 term, the Court overruled itself nine times. That is, by modern measures, a stately pace: the Rehnquist, Burger, and Warren Courts averaged 2-3 undoings per year.
So can a small change in personnel shift the stare decisis dynamic of the Court? Recent history provides an obvious example: the retirement of Felix Frankfurter and the appointment of Arthur Goldberg (and later Abe Fortas). The Warren Court has an evidence-based reputation for aggressively overruling precedent. Chief Justice Warren’s tenure was bookended by major overrulings, from Brown v. Board of Education in his first term to Chimel v. California and Brandenburg v. Ohio in his last.
But the Warren Court’s story on stare decisis is a tale of two Courts. From the 1953 through the 1961 term, the Court overruled itself only 10 times, a pace of barely over once per year. This rate was slower than the Court’s under Warren’s predecessor, Fred Vinson, and slower than that of any subsequent Court until the post-2006 Roberts Court.
And then came the 1962 term. Bang: six undoings. Then six more in 1963. Then 24 times from the 1965 through 1968 terms. From the 1962 through 1968 terms, the Court overruled precedent an average of 5+ times per term.
What changed? Felix Frankfurter. Justice Frankfurter was, of course, a leading advocate of judicial restraint (though his voting record, on some issues, tells a more complex story). And one can certainly see signs of Frankfurter’s resistance to the impending Warren Court revolution: he dissented in precedent-altering cases regarding the exclusionary rule (Mapp v. Ohio) and the one-person/one-vote doctrine (Baker v. Carr). When he retired, the dam broke: President Kennedy appointed Arthur Goldberg, and milestone undoings like Gideon v. Wainwright, Miranda v. Arizona, and Katz v. United States followed.
We see a similar shift in 1937. In Charles Evans Hughes’s first seven terms as Chief Justice, the Court overruled precedent six times. But in has last four terms, it undid itself 17 times. The shift coincided with a significant change in personnel: Willis Van Devanter, one of the conservative Four Horseman, retired; he was replaced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first appointment, Hugo Black.
We certainly can’t attribute these shifts entirely to changes in a single justice. In both instances, winds of change were already blowing, Just before Justice Van Devanter retired in 1937, the Court famously reversed course on the constitutionality of state minimum wage laws; perhaps Justice Owen Roberts’s change of position would have left the dam broken even without the Black-for-Devanter swap. And perhaps, as Frankfurter-era decisions like Mapp v. Ohio and Baker v. Carr suggest the Warren Court revolution would have rolled on even with Justice Frankfurter on the Court; indeed, many of the post-Frankfurter overrulings were by lopsided votes.
Still: a key change of personnel on a closely-divided Court can alter the dynamics of stare decisis.
So will this happen on a Kavanaugh-for-Kennedy Court? Perhaps not, at least in ways that bust the y-axis on a graph. As Professor Adler notes, the Roberts Court to this point has been the Kennedy Court. The Court’s overrulings are part of this story: when the Roberts Court has overturned precedent, it almost always has been because Justice Kennedy wanted to do it. The Court has, if one counts aggressively, overruled precedent 19 times. Justice Kennedy assented to the overruling 16 of those times (he dissented twice in Roberts-Court overrulings; in one case, he concurred in the judgment, but did not endorse the undoing of precedent). Several of these times, Justice Kennedy was in the majority in a 5-4 decisions. And, while several of these decisions skew conservative (think Citizens United), others were not (think Obergefell).
As Professor Adler points out, Justice Kennedy was not a disciple of judicial restraint. So it’s entirely possible, even with a shift in Court personnel that will be transformational on many issues, that the Roberts Court’s complex incrementalism will continue. Doctrinal change: yes. Frontal assaults on stare decisis: maybe not.
But we can safely say one thing: there will be overrulings next term. I’ll talk about that in my next post.
While I was out of town visiting family (and staying far away from computers) the country had some big appellate news! Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, giving President Trump his second Supreme Court nomination. One week ago today, President Trump announced that he was nominating D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy. Judge Kavanaugh, a former Kennedy clerk, has served on the D.C. Circuit for 12 years.
While I know that Judge Kavanaugh has lots of supporters, I was surprised by the pick for two main reasons. First, Judge Kavanaugh is very connected to the Bush II administration, having served as White House Staff Secretary. His wife also worked in the Bush administration. Second, and relatedly, Judge Kavanaugh's long time service in D.C. seems to connect him to the "swamp" that President Trump disavows. However, those two issues didn't seem to bother the President, and Judge Kavanaugh got the nod over other potential front runners including Judge Hardiman, Judge Barrett, and Judge Kethledge.
It hasn't taken long for the battle lines to be drawn in the Senate. My email has been flooded with information and stories about Judge Kavanaugh. His detractors seem to focus on hot button social issues and whether Judge Kavanaugh will be too deferential to the president. His supporters point to his long, respected record on the D.C. Circuit and the praise that he has received from his law clerks and others. It remains to be seen whether Judge Kavanaugh will be confirmed. I have heard some speculation that he could have trouble with some of the more moderate Republicans (or perhaps with Sen. Rand Paul). However, there are a lot of Senators from "red" states who are up for reelection. They might feel pressure to support the President's pick.
Apart from the politics of the Kavanaugh nomination, I am struck by how much the Supreme Court has changed in the last 13 years. When I graduated from law school in 2005, the Court had not changed in composition in over 10 years. In the 13 years since I graduated, we have seen five new justices (and that number will be six if President Trump's pick is confirmed). New justices mean a younger court too! The institution has changed some too, with new required e-filing. Perhaps we will even see cameras in the courtroom in the next 10 years.
For the present though, we will watch and wait to see if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed in time for the Court's October 2018 term. It should be an interesting summer!
With Justice Kennedy's retirement and confirmation hearings for his soon-to-be-named replacement looming, public discourse is thick with talk of stare decisis. Will/should a post-Kennedy Court overrule Roe v. Wade (or, more accurately, the "central holding" of RvW that survived Planned Parenthood v. Casey)? Obergefell v. Hodges?
I won't try to answer these questions (and, of course, neither will the nominee). And I can't begin to address, in anything short of of roomful of treatises, the complexities of the customs and law of precedent. But as the summer grinds on, I'd like to devote a few of my posts here to judicial undoing: the circumstances, process, and advocacy of overruling.
Of course the stories behind these numbers often fascinate. Including the stories of the advocacy: of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education, of summer associate John Hart Ely’s extensive work on brief in Gideon v. Wainwright, of Seattle associate Jeffrey Fisher’s brilliant briefing in Crawford v. Washington (during the same term that he argued—and won—another blockbuster, Blakely v. Washington), of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Duren v. Missouri (Chief Justice Burger: “Mrs. Ginsburg, you may lower the lectern if you would like.”).
And there are stories in the numbers themselves. One can, crudely, track the shifts in the role of the federal judiciary from the we’re-not-undoing-much-because-there’s-not-much-to-undo Marshall Court (3 overrulings in 34 years) to the fast-pace undoings of the post-Frankfurter Warren Court (34 overrulings between 1962 and 1969). One can find, as Jonathan Adler did in a recent post at the Volokh Conspiracy, data that might give us insight into what comes next: the Roberts Court, particularly since the overruling-heavy 2006-07 term, has overruled precedent at a significantly slower pace than its postwar predecessors. Although that might change. Occasionally, the data appear to tell the story of a shift in personnel. From 1954 to early 1962, the Warren Court overturned precedent relatively slowly. But then, in the wake of the wrenching decision in Baker v. Carr (listen to this episode of the More Perfect podcast), Felix Frankfurter suffered a stroke and retired from the Court. He was replaced by Arthur Goldberg. It’s quite fair to say that the two justices were polar opposites on issues of judicial restraint. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but the Warren Court more than tripled its rate of overruling after the shift.
In my next few posts, I'll dig more into the Supreme Court and judicial undoing: the first times, the last times, the next times, and so on.

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