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Full-Text Articles in Law
Supreme Court As Superweapon: A Response To Epps & Sitaraman, Stephen E. Sachs
Supreme Court As Superweapon: A Response To Epps & Sitaraman, Stephen E. Sachs
Faculty Scholarship
Is the Supreme Court's legitimacy in crisis? Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman argue that it is. In their Feature, How to Save the Supreme Court, they suggest legally radical reforms to restore a politically moderate Court. Unfortunately, their proposals might destroy the Court's legitimacy in order to save it. And their case that there is any crisis may fail to persuade a reader with different legal or political priors. If the Supreme Court needs saving, it will be saving from itself, and from too broad a conception of its own legal omnipotence. A Court that seems unbound by legal principle …
Reciprocal Legitimation In The Federal Courts System, Neil S. Siegel
Reciprocal Legitimation In The Federal Courts System, Neil S. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
Much scholarship in law and political science has long understood the U.S. Supreme Court to be the “apex” court in the federal judicial system, and so to relate hierarchically to “lower” federal courts. On that top-down view, exemplified by the work of Alexander Bickel and many subsequent scholars, the Court is the principal, and lower federal courts are its faithful agents. Other scholarship takes a bottom-up approach, viewing lower federal courts as faithless agents or analyzing the “percolation” of issues in those courts before the Court decides. This Article identifies circumstances in which the relationship between the Court and other …