Explains how United States presidents select justices for the Supreme Court, evaluates the performance of each justice, and examines the influence of politics on their selection.

Norman Vieira and Leonard Gross provide an in-depth analysis of the political and legal framework surrounding the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees. President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court met with a fierce opposition that was apparent in his confirmation hearings, which were different in many ways from those of any previous nominee. This behind-the-scenes view of the politics and personalities involved in the Bork confirmation controversy provides a framework for future debates regarding the confirmation process. To help establish that framework, Vieira and Gross examine the similarities as well as the differences between the Bork confirmation battle and other confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominees.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021: POLITICS BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL "A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.

The process by which presidents decide whom to nominate to fill Supreme Court vacancies is obviously of far-ranging importance, particularly because the vast majority of nominees are eventually confirmed. But why is one individual selected from among a pool of presumably qualified candidates? In Strategic Selection: Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, Christine Nemacheck makes heavy use of presidential papers to reconstruct the politics of nominee selection from Herbert Hoover's appointment of Charles Evan Hughes in 1930 through President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito in 2005. Bringing to light firsthand evidence of selection politics and of the influence of political actors, such as members of Congress and presidential advisors, from the initial stages of formulating a short list through the president's final selection of a nominee, Nemacheck constructs a theoretical framework that allows her to assess the factors impacting a president's selection process. Much work on Supreme Court nominations focuses on struggles over confirmation, or is heavily based on anecdotal material and posits the "idiosyncratic" nature of the selection process; in contrast, Strategic Selection points to systematic patterns in judicial selection. Nemacheck argues that although presidents try to maximize their ideological preferences and minimize uncertainty about nominees' conduct once they are confirmed, institutional factors that change over time, such as divided government and the institutionalism of the presidency, shape and constrain their choices. By revealing the pattern of strategic action, which she argues is visible from the earliest stages of the selection process, Nemacheck takes us a long way toward understanding this critically important part of our political system.

He describes a new and better manner of deliberating about who should serve on the Court - an approach that puts the burden on nominees to show that their judicial philosophies and politics are acceptable to senators and citizens alike. And he makes a new case for the virtue of judicial moderates."

In The Selling of Supreme Court Nominees, Maltese traces the evolution of the contentious and controversial confirmation process awaiting today's nominees to the nation's highest court. His story begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, when social and technological changes led to the rise of organized interest groups. Despite occasional victories, Maltese explains, structural factors limited the influence of such groups well into this century. Until 1913, senators were not popularly elected but chosen by state legislatures, undermining the potent threat of electoral retaliation that interest groups now enjoy. And until Senate rules changed in 1929, consideration of Supreme Court nominees took place in almost absolute secrecy. Floor debates and the final Senate vote usually took place in executive session. Even if interest groups could retaliate against senators, they often did not know whom to retaliate against.

Yalof takes the reader behind the scenes of what happens before the Senate hearings to show how presidents decide who will sit on the highest court in the land. He draws on the papers of 7 modern presidents and firsthand interviews with key figures.

The process by which Supreme Court judges are appointed is traditionally a quiet affair, but this certainly wasn’t the case when Prime Minister Stephen Harper selected Justice Marc Nadon for appointment to Canada’s highest court. Here, for the first time, is the complete story of “the Nadon Reference” – one of the strangest sagas in Canadian legal history. Following the Prime Minister's announcement, controversy swirled and debate raged: as a federal court judge, was Marc Nadon eligible for one of the three seats traditionally reserved for Quebec? Then, in March 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada broke new ground in statutory interpretation and constitutional law when it released the Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss 5 and 6. With detailed historical and legal analysis, including never-before-published interviews, The Tenth Justice explains how the Nadon Reference came to be a case at all, the issues at stake, and its legacy.

This account of the machinations following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and their damaging effects, is “a gripping tale of insider Washington” (The Boston Globe). In this book, the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times provides a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital. The embodiment of American conservative jurisprudence, Scalia cast an expansive shadow over the Court for three decades. His unexpected death in February 2016 created a vacancy that precipitated a pitched political fight that would change not only the tilt of the court, but the course of American history. It would help decide a presidential election, fundamentally alter longstanding protocols of the Senate, and transform the Supreme Court—which has long held itself as a neutral arbiter above politics—into another branch of the federal government riven by partisanship. In an unheard-of development, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a confirmation hearing. Not one Republican in the Senate would meet with him. Scalia’s seat would be held open until Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, was confirmed in April 2017. Hulse tells the story of this battle to control the Court through exclusive interviews with McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and other top officials, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, as well as never-before-reported details. Confirmation Bias provides much-needed context, revisiting the judicial wars of recent decades to show how they led to our current polarization. He examines the politicization of the federal bench and the implications for public confidence in the courts, and takes us behind the scenes to explore how many long-held democratic norms and entrenched bipartisan procedures have been erased across all three branches of government. Includes a new afterword “An absorbing, if dispiriting, look at the maneuverings of inside players like McConnell and Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, and outside advocates like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who appears to have steered judicial selection as much as anyone in the White House.” —The Washington Post

Organized according to the distinct stages of the nomination process, this text comprehensively details the process by which justices of the Supreme Court are nominated and confirmed.