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Georgetown law Professor Steve Vladeck is one of the leading critics of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But in an insightful recent post<\/a> on his substack, he outlines key reasons why “court expansion” is a bad response to its flaws. The cure is likely to be worse than the disease:<\/p>\n [I]t seems to me that those who are fully onboard the expansion-or-bust train should have to do more than simply assert<\/em> that having four new Democratic appointees on the Court in 2029 would be a self-evidently “good” thing. If nothing else, proponents of expansion should have to answer the following four questions:<\/p>\n He adds that court-packing could easily “permanently undermine judicial review as an institution.” The rest of his piece (which is behind a paywall) offers far from reassuring answers to these questions.<\/p>\n I have offered similar criticisms of court-packing in a long series of articles and blog posts, most recently in a June Lawfare<\/em> article<\/a>\u00a0 where I explained (among other things) why the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais<\/em> doesn’t justify packing, and in a July UnPopulist<\/em> article<\/a> critiquing a court-packing proposal advanced by Andy Craig. In these pieces, I explain why the Court’s record of checking dangerous abuses of government power – though not without serious flaws – is considerably better than many critics claim. In addition, I argue that court-packing is likely to undermine effective judicial review – not only by the Supreme Court, but also by lower courts.<\/p>\n Like Vladeck, I think some of the issues that concern critics of the Court can be more effectively addressed in other ways. For example, in the Lawfare article, I explain how Congress can fix the flaws of the Callais<\/em> decision by banning or restricting gerrymandering. It could also enact a binding ethics code for the justices. Justice Alito was wrong to suggest otherwise<\/a>, back in 2023. That said, if your main goal is a sweeping reversal of much of the Court’s recent jurisprudence, there may be no easy way to achieve that quickly without court-packing or something like it. I would argue that any benefits that might achieve are outweighed by the enormous costs of destroying judicial review.<\/p>\n In addition, if your objection to the Court’s recent decisions is that they often don’t do enough to constrain unconstitutional actions by other branches of government or by the states, court-packing is likely to make that problem worse, not better. Destroying judicial review won’t enforce tighter constitutional constraints on the executive or bring back Roe v. Wade.\u00a0<\/em>To the contrary, it would largely destroy any hope of doing so.<\/p>\n In another recent piece<\/a>, I assessed “non-packing” rationales for increasing the size of the Supreme Court. There, I argue that these rationales are mostly weak; and, to the extent they have merit, there are better ways to address them than an expansion that amounts to court-packing. I even outline possible ways to increase the size of the Court without creating an opportunity for court-packing (this would require allowing the party that doesn’t hold the White House to pick some of the new justices).<\/p>\n The post Steve Vladeck's "Hard Questions About Court Expansion"<\/a> appeared first on Reason Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A leading critic of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court oultines reasons why court-packing is a bad response to its flaws. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-131755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-policy","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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