Explains when, why, and how citizens try to limit the Supreme Court's independence and power-- and why it matters.

This book investigates the causes and consequences of congressional attacks on the US Supreme Court, arguing that the extent of public support for judicial independence constitutes the practical limit of judicial independence. First, the book presents a historical overview of Court-curbing proposals in Congress. Then, building on interviews with Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and judicial and legislative staffers, the book theorizes that congressional attacks are driven by public discontent with the Court. From this theoretical model, predictions are derived about the decision to engage in Court-curbing and judicial responsiveness to Court-curbing activity in Congress. The Limits of Judicial Independence draws on illustrative archival evidence, systematic analysis of an original dataset of Court-curbing proposals introduced in Congress from 1877 onward and judicial decisions.

"This is quite simply the best study of judicial independence that I have ever read; it is erudite, historically aware, and politically astute." ---Malcolm M. Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley "Professor Geyh has written a wise and timely book that is informed by the author's broad and deep experience working with the judicial and legislative branches, by the insights of law, history and political science, and by an appreciation of theory and common sense." ---Stephen B. Burbank, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Law School With Congress threatening to "go nuclear" over judicial appointments, and lawmakers accusing judges of being "arrogant, out of control, and unaccountable," many pundits see a dim future for the autonomy of America's courts. But do we really understand the balance between judicial independence and Congress's desire to limit judicial reach? Charles Geyh's When Courts and Congress Collide is the most sweeping study of this question to date, and an unprecedented analysis of the relationship between Congress and our federal courts. Efforts to check the power of the courts have come and gone throughout American history, from the Jeffersonian Congress's struggle to undo the work of the Federalists, to FDR's campaign to pack the Supreme Court, to the epic Senate battles over the Bork and Thomas nominations. If legislators were solely concerned with curbing the courts, Geyh suggests, they would use direct means, such as impeaching uncooperative judges, gerrymandering their jurisdictions, stripping the bench's oversight powers, or slashing judicial budgets. Yet, while Congress has long been willing to influence judicial decision-making indirectly by blocking the appointments of ideologically unacceptable nominees, it has, with only rare exceptions, resisted employing more direct methods of control. When Courts and Congress Collide is the first work to demonstrate that this balance is governed by a "dynamic equilibrium": a constant give-and-take between Congress's desire to control the judiciary and its respect for historical norms of judicial independence. It is this dynamic equilibrium, Geyh says, rather than what the Supreme Court or the Constitution says about the separation of powers, that defines the limits of the judiciary's independence. When Courts and Congress Collide is a groundbreaking work, requiring all of us to consider whether we are on the verge of radically disrupting our historic balance of governance. Charles Gardner Geyh is Professor of Law and Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at Indiana University at Bloomington. He has served as director of the American Judicature Society's Center for Judicial Independence, reporter to the American Bar Association Commission on Separation of Powers and Judicial Independence, and counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Examines the relationship between the president and the Supreme Court, including how presidents view the norm of judicial independence.

"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

"A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.

In the 1918 Michigan race for the U.S. Senate, auto tycoon Henry Ford faced off against a less well-known industrialist, Truman Newberry. Bent on countering Ford's fame and endorsement from President Wilson, Newberry's campaign spent an extravagant amount, in fact much more than the law seemed to allow. This led to his conviction under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act-but also to his eventual exoneration in the first campaign finance case to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Newberry v. United States the Court ruled that Congress had no jurisdiction to regulate primary elections, a controversial decision that allowed southern states to create whites-only primaries and stalled campaign finance reform. In the first book in eight decades on this initial test of federal campaign finance regulations, Paula Baker examines this case study of state and local campaign spending to describe how politicians found their footing in an environment created by progressive reform and invented modern campaigns. Through this seminal election, she pries apart two persistent strains in American political culture: suspicion of money in politics and suspicion of politics itself. In reexamining the story of the 1918 election, Baker takes a broad view of the history of the political reform to probe some of the foundational arguments about why money in politics sometimes seems so corrupt. She follows the controversy as it unfolded-beginning with progressive reform of politics and the remaking of campaigns-then takes readers through the shifting scenes, from Detroit to Washington, where the Ford-Newberry conflict played out. Baker reexamines the political divisions between conservatives and progressive reformers to reveal contradictions in how Progressive Era federal finance regulations worked, with efforts to weaken the power of political parties and democratize politics actually making campaigns more expensive. And although the law opened the door to partisan prosecutions for spending, Congress remained unwilling to craft legislation that actually curbed spending. While legislation in recent decades largely has aimed at contributions rather than spending and the Supreme Court has weighed whether specific limits abridge free speech, Progressive Era ideas about money and politics continue to guide campaign finance reform. Curbing Campaign Cash provides a compelling new account of a key chapter in the history of this issue.