Making the Supreme Court

Reviews / Votes

Making the Supreme Court uses judicial nominees to investigate larger changes in American politics over the last century, enduring questions about the administrative state, political parties, citizens, interest groups, and lobbying-not to mention nettlesome debates about voter rationality, the downstream effects of partisan polarization, and plenty more besides. Keenly perceptive and abundantly inquisitive, Cameron and Kastellec have delivered a tour de force that is sure to have a major impact on our understanding of all of American politics. * William Howell, Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics, The University of Chicago * Making the Supreme Court is a game changer. It describes and analyzes the entire appointments process with the goal of explaining why Supreme Court nominations transformed from low to high salience events, and how this transformation affects the contemporary court. Because, on the authors' account, the transformation touched every aspect of the process-from the president's approach to selecting nominees to the media's coverage of the proceedings-an expansive approach was required. And Cameron and Kastellec take on the task with gusto. For each change they posit, they dig in, ultimately developing a compelling mix of evidence connecting the transformation to the Court and its decisions-meaning that Making the Supreme Court's contributions transcend the selection of justices; the results help us make sense of the behavior of the contemporary court. * Lee Epstein, University Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Southern California * An exemplary analysis of a hugely important political phenomenon: the evolution of a strongly partisan, and likely, very stable court. How did this happen? The authors argue that the answer is found in appointment politics, writ large. Supreme Court appointments are examined and explained systemically, from the vantages of presidents, senators, justices, media, voters, the past, present, and the futures too. Powerful analytic tools and models are developed and deployed, alternative theories are carefully examined and eliminated, and the results are persuasive. Making the Supreme Court is a definitive account that seems likely to last as long as the current court majority. * John A. Ferejohn, Samuel Tilden Professor of Law, New York University School of Law * Cameron and Kastellec's Making the Supreme Court is deeply researched and thought-out, and both theoretically and historically sophisticated. It will in short order become the key work on Supreme Court appointment politics. * Josh Chafetz, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center * The book's discussion of the evolution of procedural dynamics is supported by relevant graphs, tables, and surveys. This book will become a classic illustration of the use of empirical analysis for explaining public policy. * Choice * The book is a great success. Cameron and Kastellec's analyses of the many stages in the construction of the Supreme Court are separately well-done and, together, stack into a solid account of Supreme Court appointments. The authors' data will circulate widely, stimulating new empirical research in judicial politics well beyond the problems of nominations and confirmations, and their theoretical arguments will exert substantial gravity on the study of appointment politics going forward. The book is well worth a place in any graduate or advanced undergraduate course on judicial politics, but students and scholars of the presidency, Congress, and public management would also learn much from it. * Joseph Ura, Congress & the Presidency * Making the Supreme Court...stands alone as the most ambitious empirical analysis of how the Supreme Court is constructed politically. No other books come close to matching its exhaustive analyses of the data pertaining to how presidents, senators, interest groups, and party leaders and activists construct the composition and direction of the nation's highest Court. ... To say the least, no one who wishes to learn from or do any seriously empirical work on the shaping of the Supreme Court can ignore it. * Michael J. Gerhardt, Political Science Quarterly *