How to Save the Supreme Court with Epps & Sitaraman
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Professors Dan Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman talk about their recently published Feature, How to Save the Supreme Court. They argue that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation represents a stunning Republican victory after decades of increasingly partisan battles over control of the Court. The result is a Supreme Court whose Justices are likely to vote along party lines more consistently than ever before in American history. That development gravely threatens the Court’s legitimacy. If in the future roughly half of Americans lack confidence in the Supreme Court’s impartiality, its power to settle important legal questions will be in jeopardy. Moreover, many Democrats are already calling for changes like court-packing, which could provoke further escalation that would damage the Court’s image and the rule of law. The coming crisis can be stopped. But this will require a radical rethinking of how the Court has operated for more than two centuries. The Feature outlines a new framework for Supreme Court reform. The authors evaluate existing proposals and offer two of their own: the Supreme Court Lottery and the Balanced Bench. We can save what is good about the Court, they argue, but only if we are willing to transform it.