The Supreme Court is an instrument of minority rule, made more consequential by its growing power over our democracy. We discuss proposals to rein in the Court's power and make it more responsive to the needs of the country.
My thinking on the SCOTUS began from the question of what is the best number of justices? Eventually that line of thinking landed at the realization that unlike the other branches of government i cannot give a basis in representative democracy or law for any set number. I agree with your point that we have too few for both capacity and diversity reasons. However I can’t come up with a justification for setting it at any specific number. What we should do is have more, probably many more, and appoint new ones more often so that we are regularly updating the views and experiences of the judicial body as you also discussed. The way to do this would be to legislate a schedule of regular appointments without regard to the total number of justices. new appointments every two years when we get a new senate class. I don’t see a reason we couldn’t or shouldn’t have hundreds of justices. I really don’t see how we justify having so few.
Interesting thought process. Like you, I don’t see any justification for a particular number of justices. I do, however, think that it being the “supreme” court, the court of last resort, we shouldn’t have too many. Imagine, for example, if we had 1,000 Supreme Court justices. How, then, would we distinguish between the Supreme Court and the broader, larger federal judiciary? In my opinion, the number of justices has to be large enough to handle the workload reasonably (but, perhaps, cases could be heard by a randomly-selected subset of the justices), but small enough to remain the “court of last resort”. We could achieve something like you suggest by providing each President a fixed number of appointments per term and letting the size of the Court fluctuate to some extent based on retirements and deaths of existing justices.
My thinking on the SCOTUS began from the question of what is the best number of justices? Eventually that line of thinking landed at the realization that unlike the other branches of government i cannot give a basis in representative democracy or law for any set number. I agree with your point that we have too few for both capacity and diversity reasons. However I can’t come up with a justification for setting it at any specific number. What we should do is have more, probably many more, and appoint new ones more often so that we are regularly updating the views and experiences of the judicial body as you also discussed. The way to do this would be to legislate a schedule of regular appointments without regard to the total number of justices. new appointments every two years when we get a new senate class. I don’t see a reason we couldn’t or shouldn’t have hundreds of justices. I really don’t see how we justify having so few.
Interesting thought process. Like you, I don’t see any justification for a particular number of justices. I do, however, think that it being the “supreme” court, the court of last resort, we shouldn’t have too many. Imagine, for example, if we had 1,000 Supreme Court justices. How, then, would we distinguish between the Supreme Court and the broader, larger federal judiciary? In my opinion, the number of justices has to be large enough to handle the workload reasonably (but, perhaps, cases could be heard by a randomly-selected subset of the justices), but small enough to remain the “court of last resort”. We could achieve something like you suggest by providing each President a fixed number of appointments per term and letting the size of the Court fluctuate to some extent based on retirements and deaths of existing justices.
Today’s NY Times has an article about a study that shows that the likelihood of getting a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice increases sharply for people who were undergraduates at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Here’s a link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/supreme-court-ivy-league-harvard-yale.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare