Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Pack the Court! A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion by Stephen M. Feldman ’77

March 1, 2022

Tags Alumni Book

Pack the Court! A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion

Stephen M. Feldman ’77

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021)
The U.S. Supreme Court has numbered nine justices for the past 150 years. But that number is not fixed. “With Democrats controlling the House and Senate, they could add justices to the Supreme Court. But would court-packing destroy the court as an apolitical judicial institution?” This is the question that Feldman, the Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Wyoming, addresses using a historical, analytical, and political argument to justify court-packing in general and Democratic court packing more specifically.

According to Mark Tushnet, professor emeritus of Harvard University Law School, the book “develops a clear and cogent argument, accessible to non-specialists, that law and politics always interact with constitutional law, both in the large — as when justices are appointed — and in the small — as in every decision interpreting the Constitution. Feldman shows court-packing wouldn’t politicize a nonpolitical institution devoted solely to ‘law,’ but would respond to the form that politicization has taken on the Roberts Court. This book is an important contribution to public debate and the understanding of our Constitution and the Supreme Court.”