Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T03:25:16.292Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Politics of Judicial Reform

from III - Ramifications of the Judicial Tug-of-War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2020

Adam Bonica
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Maya Sen
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

As our discussion in Chapter 6 makes clear, how judges are selected shapes the power dynamics of the judicial tug of war. This makes judicial selection itself a source of heated conflict, the subject we take up in Chapter 7. We use our judicial tug-of-war framework to explore how the parties respond or try to change existing judicial selection mechanisms. Specifically, as we show, the greater the misalignment between the ideological preferences of attorneys and politicians, the greater the incentives political elites will have to introduce ideological considerations into the judicial selection process. Understanding this dynamic, we argue, is key to both explaining and predicting attempts at judicial reform: Under current ideological configurations, conservatives will, depending on how liberal they perceive the bar to be, back reform efforts oriented toward partisan elections and executive appointments, while liberals will work to maintain merit-oriented commissions. We explore the contours of this predictive framework with three illustrative case studies: Florida in 2001, Kansas in 2011, and North Carolina in 2016.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Judicial Tug of War
How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary
, pp. 215 - 249
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×