Court Reform for Progressives: A Primer on Constitutional Considerations

Abstract

This brief and basically unannotated essay lays out some constitutional considerations associated with prominent (and some not so prominent) proposals for Supreme Court reform circulating among progressives. The essay has four parts, dealing successively with low-hanging fruit (about which there are few constitutional questions—though not none), statutory term limits including “bells-and-whistles” proposals for accomplishing effective term limits, jurisdiction-stripping, and Court expansion. The conclusion: Proposals for Court reform raise rather deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have—as does resistance to such proposals (that is, saying that Court reform is a bad idea raises deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have and which the objector believes to be close to what we actually have).

Keywords: Court packing, Supreme Court, constitutional law, jurisdiction stripping, term limits