Making the Supreme Court - The Politics of Appointments, 1930-2020

In Making the Supreme Court, Charles M. Cameron and Jonathan P. Kastellec examine 90 years of American political history to show how the growth of federal judicial power from the 1930s onward inspired a multitude of groups struggling to shape judicial policy. As Cameron and Kastellec argue, the result is a new politics aimed squarely at selecting and placing judicial ideologues on the Court. They make the case that this new model gradually transformed how the Court itself operates, turning it into an ideologically driven and polarized branch. Based on rich data and qualitative evidence, Making the Supreme Court provides a sharp lens on the social and political transformations that created a new American politics.

List of contents

• I. What Happened


• Then and Now


• The Party Demands: Party Agendas for the Supreme Court


• Selecting How to Select: Presidents and Organizational Design


• The Candidates for the Court and the Nominees


• Interest Groups


• The Media, co-authored with Leeann Bass and Julian Dean


• Public Opinion


• Decision in the Senate


• II. Why it Happened


• The Logic of Presidential Selection, co-authored with Lauren Mattioli


• What the Public Wanted


• Voting in the Shadow of Accountability: Senators' Confirmation Decisions


• III. How It Matters, and What the Future Holds


• New Politics, New Justices, New Policies: The Courts That Politics Made


• The Future: The Courts that Politics May Make


• What Future Do We Want? Evaluating Judicial Independence


• Conclusion

About the author

Charles M. Cameron is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency, and legislatures. The author of numerous articles in leading journals of political science, he is also the author of Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power, which won the American Political Science Association's Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize and the William H. Riker Award. He was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

Jonathan P. Kastellec is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are in American political institutions, with a particular focus on judicial politics and the politics of Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Journal of Law, Economics & Organization; Journal of Empirical Legal Studies; and Political Research Quarterly.

Summary

Appointments to the United States Supreme Court are now central events in American political life. Every vacancy unleashes a bitter struggle between Republicans and Democrats over nominees; and once the seat is filled, new justices typically vote in predictable ways. However, this has not always been the case. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, presidents invested little time and effort in finding and vetting nominees, often selecting personal cronies, who senators briskly confirmed. Media coverage was desultory, public opinion was largely non-existent, and the justices often voted independently and erratically.

In Making the Supreme Court, Charles M. Cameron and Jonathan P. Kastellec examine 90 years of American political history to show how the growth of federal judicial power from the 1930s onward inspired a multitude of groups struggling to shape judicial policy. Over time, some groups moved beyond lobbying the Court to changing who sits on it. Other groups formed expressly to influence appointments. These activists and organized groups penetrated the national party system so that after about 1980, presidential candidates increasingly pledged to select and confirm nominees who conformed to specific policy and ideological litmus tests. Once in office, these presidents re-shaped the executive selection system to deliver on their promises. Moreover, the selection process for justices turned into media events, often fueled by controversy. As Cameron and Kastellec argue, the result is a new politics aimed squarely at selecting and placing judicial ideologues on the Court. They make the case that this new model gradually transformed how the Court itself operates, turning it into an ideologically driven and polarized branch. Based on rich data and qualitative evidence, Making the Supreme Court provides a sharp lens on the social and political transformations that created a new American politics.

Additional text

The book is a great success. Cameron and Kastellec's analyses of the many stages in the construction of the Supreme Court are separately well-done and, together, stack into a solid account of Supreme Court appointments. The authors' data will circulate widely, stimulating new empirical research in judicial politics well beyond the problems of nominations and confirmations, and their theoretical arguments will exert substantial gravity on the study of appointment politics going forward. The book is well worth a place in any graduate or advanced undergraduate course on judicial politics, but students and scholars of the presidency, Congress, and public management would also learn much from it.

Product details

• Authors: Cameron , Kastellec , Charles M. Cameron, Charles M. (Professor of Politics and Pub Cameron, Cameron Charles M., Jonathan P. Kastellec
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.08.2023
• EAN: 9780197680544
• ISBN: 978-0-19-768054-4
• No. of pages: 504
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Comparative Politics, Political structure & processes, Comparative Politics, Political structure and processes