1937—Unhappy with the Supreme Court’s rulings against New Deal legislation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces a plan to expand the Court to as many as 15 justices. On the pretext that aging justices are unable to keep up with their workload, FDR’s Court-packing plan would add a new justice for each sitting justice who remained on the Court past the age of 70 (up to a total of six new seats).
FDR’s plan will elicit scathing criticism, including from his fellow Democrats. A Senate Judiciary Committee report on the plan will denounce it “as a needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle” and will recommend that it “be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” In July 1937, a Senate with 76 Democrats will vote by a 70-20 margin to send back to committee a judicial-reform bill that includes the Court-packing plan and will instruct the committee to strip the plan from the bill.
1996—In a muddled speech on the “majesty of the law” at Suffolk University law school, then-district judge Sonia Sotomayor complains that “the public fails to appreciate the importance of indefiniteness in the law”—indefiniteness that sometimes results from the fact that “a given judge (or judges) may develop a novel approach to a specific set of facts or legal framework that pushes the law in a new direction.”
Somehow Sotomayor doesn’t see fit even to question whether, and under what circumstances, it’s proper or desirable for judges to “develop a novel approach” that “pushes the law in a new direction.” Instead, she complains about “recurring public criticism about the judicial process.” The fact that Sotomayor cites as her lead example of unwelcome “public criticism” an article “describing Senator Dole’s criticism of [the] liberal ideology of Clinton judicial appointments and [of the] American Bar Association” lends credence to the suspicion that Sotomayor is less interested in the majesty of the law than in the majesty of liberal activist judges.
