Supreme Court prestige rose steadily despite raw political appointment fights

Evidence

Despite the politics of the appointment process, and the judges’ own nose for politics—​and the many instances of raw ambition—​the Supreme Court had an unblemished record for honesty. Decisions were crafted with care. The prestige of the Court ebbed and flowed, but the long-​range trend, as far as one can tell, rose fairly steadily. The judges had tremendous responsibilities—​and life tenure. They were totally independent of regime changes, and this may have enhanced their prestige. The justices survived the Dred Scott case, the Civil Rights cases, the Slaughterhouse case, the Income Tax case, and the thousand crises, large and small, that rained in upon their heads, many of which they brought on themselves. Their written opinions were always sleekly professional. Increasingly, the general public—​people who never read a word, or a sentence, of the Court’s written output—​seemed to accept the Court as powerful and legitimate. The Supreme Court by 1900, an institution more than a century old, was accepted as a fixed, stable, and honorable part of the government. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2206

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the course’s institutional narrative on judicial review ch52 ‘golden age’ and legitimacy; the Court’s legitimacy rising while its members politicked is the paradox students should sit with.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that public legitimacy attached to an institution’s written output that almost nobody actually read — legitimacy accruing to the institution, not to its reasoning — is subtle enough to reward revisiting in the course’s final synthesis.