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Judicial Independence, Judicial Accountability And Interbranch Relations, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this paper I argue that the main cause of the poisonous state of interbranch relations involving the federal judiciary, as of the frequent and strident attacks on courts, federal and state, are strategies calculated to persuade the public that courts are part of ordinary politics and thus that judges are policy agents to be held accountable as such. Although unremarkable in the sense that a breakdown in norms of interdependency is a defining characteristic of contemporary politics, I regard the current situation involving the federal judiciary as remarkably dangerous because of the possibility that a tipping point of no …