Four ways to expand the US Supreme Court... [View all]

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Excerpted from the Harvard Law & Policy Review:

The first and most straightforward approach to expanding the Court is adding two, four, or six new justices to the Court. This suggestion has been advanced by Professor Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School, among others...

The second option is to reconstitute the Supreme Court in the image of a federal court of appeals. This course of action would increase the number of justices to fifteen or a similar number. Panels of justices would be drawn from this larger group, with an option of en banc review. This plan would not only dislodge the Court’s current reactionary majority, but the panel format also would allow a greater number of cases to be heard.

Third is the Supreme Court Lottery, a more aggressive version of the panel strategy. Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman outlined this proposal in a Yale Law Journal piece. All federal appellate court judges, roughly 180 in total, would become associate justices on the Supreme Court. Panels of nine justices would be randomly selected from this pool. Importantly, decisions on whether to grant certiorari on a given case would be made by panel members who would not know the ideological makeup of the panel that would hear the case. This plan would frustrate partisan maneuvering.

Fourth and finally is Epps and Sitaraman’s idea for a “Balanced Bench.” The Court would have ten justices, with five seats allocated to each of the two major parties. Those ten justices would select sets of five additional justices at a time to serve a future, non-renewable one-year term. That selection would operate on a requirement of near-unanimity to ensure that this final set of five justices would be relatively even-handed. This proposal aims to counteract the effects of partisanship on the Court by explicitly recognizing and institutionalizing partisanship presence.

[link:https://harvardlpr.com/2019/05/06/the-supreme-court-has-been-expanded-many-times-before-here-are-four-ways-to-do-it-today/|]

From the Yale Law Journal:

How to Save the Supreme Court
[link:https://bit.ly/3NfeveR|]

Supreme Court as Superweapon
[link:https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/supreme-court-as-superweapon|]