Judges Commons^™

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2007 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Rupal Doshi

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

The Rehnquist Court: A "By The Numbers" Retrospective, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over the U.S. Supreme Court for nineteen years, longer than any other Chief Justice in the 20th century. Despite this longevity, however, there is little consensus on just what the legacy of the Rehnquist Court is. Was the Rehnquist Court a restrained Court that embraced a limited, text-based reading of the Constitution? Or was it a much more aggressive Court, responsible for a resurgence of conservative judicial activism? Is it best epitomized by the “swaggering confidence” that put a President in office, or the cautious minimalism that disappointed its conservative supporters by failing …

The "Federalism Five" As Supreme Court Nominees, 1971-1991, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This article looks back at the Senate confirmation hearing testimonies of five Supreme Court nominees. Following their appointments to the Court, these justices—Chief Justice Rehnquist and Associate Justices O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas—generally voted together in path-breaking federalism cases. They reinvigorated constitutional law limits or decreed new ones on national legislative power, supported the "sovereignty" of state governments, and thus came to be known in some circles as the Rehnquist Court's "Federalism Five." As nominees testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, however, these "federalism" justices did not announce, or for the most part even much hint at, what came to …

The Double Standard In Judicial Selection, Edwin Meese Iii

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Life Tenure: A Response To Professors Calabresi And Lindgren, Ryan W. Scott, David R. Stras

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Opposition to life tenure has been steadily mounting in the legal academy and Professors Steve Calabresi and Jim Lindgren are among those leading the charge. Crucial to their argument that life tenure is fundamentally flawed is an empirical claim that the increases in average tenure among Supreme Court Justices are both dramatic and unprecedented.

In this article, the authors respond to Calabresi and Lindgren by showing that their hypothesis of dramatic and unprecedented growth in average tenure has two fundamental flaws. First, it suffers from a period-selection problem. Rendering the data using longer or shorter periods blunts or eliminates the …