The Legacy of President Barack Obama in the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract

We examine President Obama’s legacy in the Supreme Court from the perspective of presidential dominance theory. We argue that Obama’s presidency produced a mixed record. He experienced both successes and challenges in attempting to shape the Court in his own image, but he largely succeeded in using the Supreme Court to secure some of his biggest policy victories as president.

Obama’s biggest and perhaps insufficiently acknowledged success was in slowing down the aggressive rightward shift of the Court with his appointment of two progressive female justices. These appointees, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, became effective counterweights to the Court’s conservative majority. Based on our comparative analysis of the voting record of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor with that of Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens whom they replaced on the Court, we find that Obama's two appointees, have not moved the Court dramatically to the left.

Analysis of Obama’s judicial legacy would be incomplete without examining his appointments to the lower federal courts. We tackle this aspect of his legacy by documenting both Obama’s difficulties in filling these lower federal court vacancies and his remarkable success in improving descriptive representation on the federal bench. President Obama appointed a higher proportion of minority and women judges than any other president in U.S. history. Ultimately, the legacy of the Obama presidency in the U.S. Supreme Court will continue to be shaped by the justices he appointed, and by the administration’s failure to seat Merrick Garland due to a blockade by Senate Republicans.

In the last section of the chapter, we analyze some of the big cases and monumental legal issues of the Obama Era, focusing on healthcare, marriage equality, and immigration.

Keywords: Obama Presidency, Supreme Court, Legacy, Presidential Dominance