8 Comments
Nov 15·edited Nov 15Liked by David Lat

Saying that the court should expand the pool of people who argue before it is something that seems appealing until you think about it a bit.

Look, either who argues before the court does or doesn't make a difference in the quality or direction of their opinions. If not then it seems like oral arguments themselves represent more of a liability than benefit so let's assume it does.

In that case, then one would tend to assume that experience and familiarity with the court would help the advocates do this job better. Just look at the performance of the PD in Raihmi to see why this tends to be the case. And surely probably the most important thing for the court is having high quality opinions (not to mention reaching, if not correct, at least consistent results) so it feels very shortsighted to just dismiss all these concerns in favor of the feel good position of more people getting to argue before the court.

And the problem with just allowing more access is there is no way to guarantee the people with the outside expertise end up arguing the cases where that matters (while having SCOTUS expertise always matters).

Now the narrower concern that the court should have a set of specialists but those specialists should be more reflective of the country along gender or race or etc lines might have a stronger prima facia case but I honestly just don't think this matters much since the general public will only look at the racial and gender makeup of the court. But in the long run this will probably shift to match the makeup of the court clerks and if the justices don't care strongly about representation in their clerks I'm skeptical the nation will either.

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This was excellently written, and Goldstein’s input on how recent Supreme Court judges have approached decision making is what many Americans fail to understand.

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Nov 15Liked by David Lat

I think that that may be the case with a one of, but not with Thomas and the scope of the gifts lavished on him, effectively doing an end run around the honorarium limitatiion rules, disclosure rules. I did an oped on that they I will send.

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Nov 15Liked by David Lat

I don’t agree with your last sentence. Deeply

Conservative decisions, reversing precedent, rendered by a justice wined and dined by the Koch brothers and comparable players plainly has an impact on how the decisions are received.

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