What Does the Supreme Court Do?

What Does the Supreme Court Do?

Description

“To consider the Supreme Court of the United States strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution, an institution, that is to say, for arriving at decisions on controversial questions of national policy.” Beginning with the failed confirmation proceedings for Robert Bork in 1986, the Supreme Court has served as a galvanizing issue in national American politics. For advocates, fundraisers, candidates, and much of the punditry, the United States is only one appointment away from Armageddon, whether defined by abortion, the death penalty, same sex rights, church/state relations, or just about any hot-button issue of our time. Nor is this particularly new. As far back as Tocqueville's wide-eyed travels in America, one of the defining features of the new world was the centrality of judicial oversight: “There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question.” And so follows the commonplace observation that the Supreme Court is in tum just another political body, a claim often accepted by the general public, and rehearsed at times by America's most-cited judge, veteran Court journalists, and elected politicians of all stripes. To the more cynical commentators, the Court is composed of politicians in robes who, under the guise of deciding cases, “legislate from the bench” as unelected, life-tenured partisans. These criticisms proliferate whenever the Court acts in the most politically controversial cases, where the Justices are described as “eager” to dictate their own policy preferences as law.

Source Publication

The U.S. Supreme Court and Contemporary Constitutional Law: The Obama Era and Its Legacy

Source Editors/Authors

Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Niels Petersen, Johannes Saurer

Publication Date

2018

What Does the Supreme Court Do?

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