By Max Bloom
Thursday, June 29, 2017
One popular school of thought holds that the Supreme
Court is by now effectively a political institution, that Democratic appointees
on the Court sit there with the purpose of enacting Democratic policies and
Republican appointees intend to enact Republican policies. In this telling, it
is naïve to think that justices should be selected by their commitment to a
particular approach to jurisprudence — unless that approach is to blindly
support the legislation of one particular party. It is this school of thought
at work when, for instance, commentators claim
that a particular decision is “heartless” and ignore the question of whether or
not it is good law; it is this school of thought at work when writers suggest that
the Supreme Court could use a justice or two without a legal background, or
when law professors suggest
that perhaps the Constitution doesn’t have very much to do with jurisprudence
anymore.
This school of thought is wrong. It is not merely
normatively wrong — as if there were no benefit in having a stable,
democratically established basis for law — but wrong as a descriptive account
of how the Supreme Court operates. The Supreme Court is at times partisan, and
the most hot-button issues do tend to produce 5–4 or 6–3 votes, but the vast
majority of cases before the Supreme Court hinge on complicated cases of law
that require the full expertise of the justices. Many of these cases are
decided unanimously. In fact, a surprising number of politically contentious
cases are decided unanimously or close to unanimously.
The most recent term, in fact, was the least partisan
since the middle of the 20th century. Over half of the cases were unanimous,
and only 14 percent were decided by a 5–3 or 5–4 split. To some degree, this
can be attributed to the fact that the Court had only eight justices for much
of the term, meaning the justices had to work to avoid tie votes, or to the
relatively inconsequential roster of cases the Court dealt with. But even in a
more typical term, approximately 80 percent of votes are in support of the
majority opinion, and only about 20 percent of cases are determined narrowly.
The 5–4 cases that get national attention are in fact somewhat anomalous.
Take the highly consequential set of Supreme Court
opinions from Monday. Perhaps the biggest was the opinion in the Trinity Lutheran case, one of the most
hotly watched cases of the term, which concerned the constitutionality of a
Missouri provision that prevented a church from obtaining state funds as part
of a program to renovate playground surfaces. The case quickly acquired a
partisan dimension: Liberals claimed that a ruling would “obliterate the divide
between church and state,” and the ACLU filed a brief in favor of the state of
Missouri. But the ultimate decision was 7–2, with Kagan and Kennedy joining the
four reliable conservatives in the majority opinion and Breyer concurring. The
Court decided as well on Monday to lift the injunction on Trump’s travel ban
for everyone who lacked a “bona fide relationship” with an American person or
entity. The travel ban, of course, is one of Trump’s central policies and has
arguably been the most contentious issue of his first six months as president.
But the decision to lift most of the injunction was unanimous, although three
conservatives justices — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — would have reinstated the
entire ban.
Then there are all the cases we don’t hear about — cases
that are often highly technical or esoteric but can still be very
consequential. To take just a few examples from the Court’s most recent term: Salman v. United States, which found
unanimously that a certain type of stock tip counted as insider trading; Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman,
which found unanimously that a New York law forbidding businesses to phrase
their credit-card fees in a certain way violated the First Amendment; Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, which
unanimously settled a highly contentious patent case involving smartphones.
These cases demonstrate the breadth and detail of knowledge employed by the justices,
who must be able to operate in fields as diverse as First Amendment
jurisprudence, criminal statutes, and patent law. That so many of these cases,
involving such technical issues, are decided unanimously is a testament to the
ways in which highly qualified thinkers can form a consensus on difficult
matters of law.
These cases may involve less high-profile issues than,
say, gay marriage and gun control, but that does not mean they are unimportant.
The ability of the Supreme Court to deliver consistent guidelines on the entire
scope of American law — from how a specific statute must be interpreted to
complicated questions over jurisdiction to the rules governing class-action
certification to the limits of sovereign immunity — undergirds our legal system.
Appointing partisan justices without regard for legal qualifications would be
like hiring Jackie Chan as a police officer — sure, he’s very useful the 1
percent of the time when martial skills are of paramount importance, but is he
really adept at the less exciting day-to-day work that makes up most of the
profession?
To be sure, 5–4 decisions do exist, and there is no
shortage of opinions, even critically important opinions, that make a lot of
political sense but very legal sense. Justices, even on the Supreme Court, are
imperfect and too often are motivated by ideological principles rather than by
a commitment to the principles of jurisprudence. But it’s wrong to see the
entirety of the Court in this light: For every 5–4 decision that polarizes American
society, there are dozens of unanimous and near-unanimous decisions that
clarify important legal questions and provide guidance to the lower courts, not
to mention the cases like Trinity
Lutheran where an unexpected alignment of justices reminds us that abstract
principles can still best partisan considerations. The Supreme Court may not be
perfect, but it is hardly the devil we so often make it out to be.
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