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2 results

  • 4 - Politicians, Their Interests, and the Judicial Tug-of-War

  • from II - Political Actors and the Incentive to Politicize
  • Adam Bonica, Stanford University, California, Maya Sen, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Judicial Tug of War
    Published online:
    09 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020, pp 105-140

  • Summary

    We pivot in this part to discussing the other key player in the judicial tug of war – political elites. Chapter 4 begins by considering how the interests of political actors and those of the bar clash over the captured judiciary. Specifically, over time, political actors and lawyers have drifted apart ideologically, resulting in tension. This mismatch, we argue, sets the stage for contemporary fights over the politicization of the judiciary, over activist judges, and over the meritocracy of the judiciary – the judicial tug of war. We also note in this chapter that an increased interjection of “politics” into the selection of judges, although perhaps unappealing to many Americans, need not necessarily be undesirable; after all, having a judiciary that represents a greater variety of political and ideological interests (including conservative ones), and not just the bar’s, might be the most desirable from a normative perspective.

The Judicial Tug of War
  • How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary
  • Adam Bonica, Maya Sen
  • Published online:
    09 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • Why have conservatives decried 'activist judges'? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? This transformative text tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts, but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.