Chapter 3

For illustrations and analysis of the ways in which Justices have shifted over time from their original ideological positions, see the article by Lee Epstein and her co-authors, “Ideological Drift Among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, and How Important?”Northwestern Law Review Colloquy 101 (2007): 127–31. The scholar who identified the presence or absence of prior executive branch experience as predictive of a new Supreme Court justice's eventual ideological shift was Michael C. Dorf in his article “Does Federal Executive Branch Experience Explain Why Some Republican Supreme Court Justices ‘Evolve’ and Others Don't?” Harvard Law& Policy Review 1 (2007): 457–76. The six justices in Dorf's “no experience” group were Blackmun, Powell, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter. In the “experienced” group were Burger, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. While this study was concluded very early in the tenures of Roberts and Alito, the author noted that “preliminary evidence indicates that the pattern will also hold” for them. The scholar who examined a nominee's geographic origin as a factor was Lawrence Baum in his book Judges and Their Audiences: A Perspective on Judicial Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). On this topic, see also my article “Change and Continuity on the Supreme Court,” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 25 (2007): 39–59, which focuses on the example of Harry Blackmun.

For a detailed account of the effort to impeach Justice Douglas, see David E. Kyvig's The Age of Impeachment: American Constitutional Culture Since 1960 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

On the debate over life tenure for Supreme Court Justices, see Reforming the Courts: Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices, ed. Roger C. Cramton and Paul D. Carrington (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006) and Sanford Levinson's Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).