Last spring, President Biden issued an executive order to form the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, a bipartisan commission charged with examining proposals for Supreme Court reform. The commission, made up of more than 30 of the nation’s leading legal scholars and experts on the judiciary, submitted a 294-page report to the president last week.
Some of the proposals examined in the report include court expansion, term limits, and jurisdiction stripping, as well as the Court’s larger role in the constitutional system. Host Jeffrey Rosen is joined by two members of the commission: Tara Leigh Grove, professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, and Keith Whittington, professor of politics at Princeton University. They lay out the cases for and against each proposal, and discuss the complications involved in implementing any of them.
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This episode was produced by Melody Rowell and engineered by Kevin Kilbourne. Research was provided by Lana Ulrich and Sam Desai.
PARTICIPANTS
Keith E. Whittington was one of the Commissioners on President Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He has published widely on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, the law and politics of impeachment, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech. His most recent books are Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech.
Tara Leigh Grove was also a member of the Commission on the Supreme Court. She is the Charles E. Tweedy, Jr. Endowed Chairholder in Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. Her research focuses on the federal judiciary and the constitutional separation of powers. She is co-author of a leading Federal Courts casebook, and she has served as the Chair of the Federal Courts Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Read the report from the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
- Tara Leigh Grove’s article “The Origins (and Fragility) of Judicial Independence”
- Keith Whittington’s book Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History
TRANSCRIPT
THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM, ACCURAC MAY VARY, AND IT MAY BE UPDATES OR REVISED IN THE FUTURE.
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