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The U.S. Supreme Court Is Not a Dahlian Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2022

Paul Baumgardner Open the ORCID record for Paul Baumgardner [Opens in a new window]  and
Calvin TerBeek
Paul Baumgardner*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA
Calvin TerBeek*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
*
Corresponding author: Paul Baumgardner, Email: [email protected] and Calvin TerBeek, Email: [email protected]
Corresponding author: Paul Baumgardner, Email: [email protected] and Calvin TerBeek, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Robert Dahl's “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker” has long enjoyed pride of place within American politics scholarship, especially among regime theorists. However, Dahl's views of the U.S. Supreme Court are no longer defensible. It is essential for our field to move beyond “Decision-Making in a Democracy” in order to better theorize and explain the modern Supreme Court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , October 2022 , pp. 148 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Dahl, Robert A., “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker,” Journal of Public Law 6 (1957): 279–95Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 284, 294.

3 Ibid., 285.

4 Ibid., 293.

5 Ibid.

6 Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).

7 On the strength of the liberal consensus in the 1950s, see Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: NYRB Books, 2008; originally published 1950); Jennifer Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

8 Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). Barry Friedman's exhaustive five-part series is a useful intellectual history of the “counter-majoritarian difficulty” that Bickel identified. See, e.g., Friedman, Barry, “The Birth of an Academic Obsession: The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Five,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 153–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 See, e.g., Graber, “The Non-Majoritarian Difficulty”; Keith Whittington, Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Congress from the Founding to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019).

15 Thomas Keck, Judicial Politics in Polarized Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

16 Timothy La Pira, Lee Drutman, and Kevin Kosar, eds., Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospect for Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

17 Frances Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

18 Jacobs, Nicholas F., King, Desmond and Milkis, Sidney M., “Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power,” Perspectives on Politics 17 (2019): 453–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20 Sarah Staszak, No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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