The Supreme Court discussion thread

I didn't realize that you were making this proposal for all types of cases, and that you basically wanted to entirely rewrite the rules on personal jurisdiction in federal cases. On balance, I suspect that corporate defendants would hate your proposal. Generally speaking, the last thing they want to do is litigate in some backwater where they do little or no business.

i mean I am very open to suggestions if you have another way to avoid forum shopping for federal cases, but yes I think it's obscene you can forum shop GIVEN for some kind of issues you know some judges are 80%+ of ruling in your favor and others are 20% or less.

ofc corporate would hate me they have their specific jurisdiction dissected and ready to try their cases more favourably than a random district judge would.

that's a deep violation of the actual concept of the rule of law in my mind.

my model here doesn't want to optimize for corporate, we need to build a robust system that is optimized to deal with a radicalized society trying to dismantle the rule of law, that's the core issue.

we are talking making the already incredibly solid American system even better to resist attempts to dismantle it. I am thinking in the really long term (centuries)

I wrote "in a sense", ie it's impossible to convince the current ruling party transitiong to that different dynamic would favor it

so you pass the amendments and then every republican in SCOTUS retires (let's say) and trump can reappoint all of them, how do you stagger them? some of them have like 8 years limits only? how do you write the transition amendments to deal with this possibility?

try to think every participant is hellbent on doing literally everything he legally can to maximize his tribe wins (that's how an Italian would think), how do you write the rules in a way they can't abuse them in the transition?

pls elaborate the bold I am not sure what you mean there.

Dude, it's not that hard. There are nine designated terms. Sitting judges are placed by seniority to each term. If someone resigns the new justice only fills the remaining part of the term and can't be reappointed. There would also need to be a rule that nominees receive a straight up/down vote within 30 days of being nominated to prevent any shenanigans like we saw previously.

THis is 95% a right wing problem ATM.

I would say 80-20 but yes. still the problem exists and it could be fixed in a way that right-wing radical feel is helpful form them (for now) while it actually solves all radicalism.

I mean at least in the terms of fixing forum shopping that is

help me understand. you want 18y limits (like the Biden proposal).

Thomas has been in the court for 33 years,
Roberts for 19 years, Alito for 18.

let's say your Biden 18y limit becomes the law tomorrow.

What happens?

they should be grandfathered in and the SC can just have weird numbers of seats sometimes. it happens.

ok so how do you get the " free slot every 2 years" starting from the grandfathering?

you add slots? that's the idea? so basically it will never be agreed upon by the party that doesn't get to sit those judges right? that was my pragmatical objection

Doesn’t have to be a free slot, as there is currently no constitutionally prescribed number of SC justices. So it would just be 10+ judges until the currently appointed justices all end up dying out and then it would normalize back to 9 or less.

The only thing worse than a 5-4 decision from this court would be a 5-5 or 4-4 non-decision stalemate. Odd numbers only imo.

why do people say this? a non-decision doesn’t mean nothing will be decided, it will just be remanded to a lower court most likely. and there have been plenty of times where the court was not odd numbered.

No one has ever done that in the past, but you would just have fewer than 9 justices if more than two died or left in a single term.

It likely wouldn't start until the following presidential term, but if it had been passed under Biden -
Thomas and Roberts forced to retire at the beginning of this year, Trump nominates two new judges.

Alito gets four bonus years, not a big deal. If he or any other justice retires or dies in the next four years, the court only has 8 members until 2029.

This is seriously simple. Whatever the schedule that is part of the law, Thomas gets put in the initial two year slot. The rest slotted in by seniority. It doesn't take too much imagination to come up with a variety of ways to make the transition. Are you being intentionally dense?

I am willing to bet that the 2+2 poker brain trust can’t come up with any term limit legislation that 9 Supreme Court Justices and their Ivy League clerks can’t defeat and stay in power.

We’re just talking about what the term limits would look like. Rest assured there is no way a constitutional amendment will happen for a long time.

no I am asking how you convince a party to accept any transition that helps the other party (in order to pass an amendment) that is in power and will fill the slots.

you need a vast bipartisan agreement for any modification of the structure right? give me a path toward that , that is sensible and will find agreement

ok so one parttt will have to agree to give 2 more SCOTUS judges to the other, because when the transition will happen there will be two slots to fill.

that is simply impossible, it will never happen, no party will ever give the other any such advantage, and no party has the what it is, 35 states, to pass an amendment.

you need to write down a transition that doesn't punish either party.

because the transition can mean 5, 10, 20 years of rulings that solidify into law one party judicial philosophy against the other.

who is gonna pay that price?

Now you're making a completely different argument. No one said this would be easy to pass.

Anyway that’s not really how the court has worked historically. A certain party can appoint judges but they don’t fall cleanly on one side of the spectrum or another. The most liberal court was chock full of Republican appointments.

in the semi-recent past for some time the two parties didn't divide under clear ideological lines yes.

but people learnt and nowadays nominees will be fully loyal tribe members dedicated uniquely flto further their tribe success.

nowadays if you agree with a republican on a controversial topics you literally can't be a democrat and viceversaz and it applies to judicial opinions as well.