A scholar of the Supreme Court and its relationship to the people of the United States says that President Joe Biden’s proposed term limits for justices can restore the court’s eroded legitimacy.
In the 2022-2023 term, the U.S. Supreme Court received approximately 7,000 to 8,000 petitions for certiorari, of which only a small fraction were granted a hearing. The Court agreed to hear about 70 cases. This means that the vast majority of cases—about 99%—were rejected and did not make it onto the Court’s docket.
The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.
That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.
This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.
In the 2022-2023 term, the U.S. Supreme Court received approximately 7,000 to 8,000 petitions for certiorari, of which only a small fraction were granted a hearing. The Court agreed to hear about 70 cases. This means that the vast majority of cases—about 99%—were rejected and did not make it onto the Court’s docket.
how does more justices help with that? do they not all hear every case? wouldn’t that end up being inconsistent?
The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.
That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.
This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.
I’m not sure how more justices would help that. They don’t all hear separate cases - they rule together as one court.