Response to Maria Popova's review of Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development

Abstract

I thank Maria Popova for her generous, thoughtful, and constructive review of my book and am delighted to hear that despite my exclusively American focus, she finds much of import in my work for scholars of comparative judicial politics. In fact, her breakdown of the potentially generalizable theoretical insights to be drawn from my book was as edifying as it was gratifying. Needless to say, had I been aware of the ways in which some of the empirical phenomena I seek to explain in the American case have since been effectively replicated in, or speak to the circumstances of, other polities, I would have made a deliberate attempt to highlight that fact.

Judicialization and Its Effects: Experiments as a Way Forward

“…These insights include how and why judicial institutions have developed (Crowe 2012), the history of interactions between the elected branches of government and the federal judiciary (Engel Merry 2011), and issues surrounding access to justice (Staszak 2015). These examples of public law scholarship, which stem from the tradition of American political development, seek to illuminate the processes that lead to outcomes (see also Mahoney 2012).…”

Erosion, Backsliding, or Abuse: Three Metaphors for Democratic Decline

“…The comparative courts literature has canvassed some key episodes of court packing worldwide, particularly in Latin America, and has noted the negative impact of many of these episodes on judicial independence and democratic governance. In the US context, some historically oriented scholars have attended to the key nineteenth-century instances in which Congress altered the Supreme Court's size or (more commonly) the key twentieth-century instance in which it nearly did so (Crowe 2012). The constitutional text does not specify the number of justices.…”