Appointments to the United States Supreme Court are now central events in American political life. Every vacancy unleashes a bitter struggle between Republicans and Democrats over nominees; and once the seat is filled, new justices typically vote in predictable ways. Making the Supreme Court examines 90 years of American political history to show how the growth of federal judicial power from the 1930s onward inspired presidents, the political parties, and interest groups to shape judicial policy through appointments. The result is a new politics aimed squarely at selecting and placing judicial ideologues on the Court, which has transformed the Court into an ideologically driven and polarized branch. Based on rich data and qualitative evidence, Making the Supreme Court provides a sharp lens on the social and political transformations that created a new American politics.
Making the Supreme Court is published by Oxford University Press. The book is now available for purchase from Oxford, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. (You can get a 25% discount from Oxford using the code ASFLYQ6 at this link.) The audiobook version can be found here.
Click here to read Chapter 1 of the book.
— “Narrowly construed, Making the Supreme Court examines the politics of judicial appointments: who is nominated, who is appointed, and with what consequences. But in truth, the book does so much more. Keenly perceptive and abundantly inquisitive, Cameron and Kastellec use 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. This book is a tour de force. It is sure to have a major impact on our understanding of all of American politics.” — William Howell, 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 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. Theirs is a definitive account that seems likely to last as long as the current court majority.” —John Ferejohn, New York University
— "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, Georgetown University