Purchase
Description
Before
Supreme Court nominees are allowed take their
place on the high Court, they must face a moment of democratic
reckoning by
appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite the potential
this
holds for public input into the direction of legal change, the hearings
are
routinely derided as nothing but empty rituals and political
grandstanding. In
this book, Paul M. Collins, Jr. and Lori A. Ringhand present a
different view.
Using both empirical data and stories culled from more than seventy
years of
transcripts, they demonstrate the hearings are a vibrant and democratic
forum
for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change. As such,
they are
one of the ways in which “We the People” take ownership of
the Constitution by
examining the core constitutional values of those permitted to
interpret it on
our behalf.
Features
-
Provides the most comprehensive examination ever undertaken of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings of Supreme Court nominees
-
Marries cutting-edge normative constitutional scholarship with quantitative and historical research on confirmation politics to develop a novel theory of the role of confirmation hearings and constitutional change
- Makes use of more than 70 years of stories culled from confirmation hearing transcripts to vividly illustrate how American history, social change and constitutional development are both reflected in and influence the confirmation process
-
Appropriate for use in advanced undergraduate, graduate, and law school courses focusing on constitutional law, empirical legal studies, judicial politics, law and society, legal history, and the U.S. Supreme Court
“Collins
and Ringhand’s SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATION HEARINGS AND
CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE is
an important addition to the literature on Supreme Court selection
politics
generally and the most important study available on confirmation
hearings per
se. More generally and, at least as importantly, it carries important
messages
about the interface between confirmation politics and democratic
theory, ones
that have certainly changed the way I will view and evaluate Supreme
Court
confirmation hearings past and future.”
-Elliot Slotnick, Ohio State University, in Law & Politics Book Review
“Conventional
wisdom suggests that confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justices
before the
Senate Judiciary Committee are broken, but Collins (Univ. of North
Texas) and
Ringhand (Univ. of Georgia School of Law) present a sophisticated,
empirically
grounded argument that suggests that they are not. Indeed, Collins and
Ringhand
celebrate the process for conveying to nominees evolving constitutional
understandings. This book is a game changer. Summing Up:
Highly recommended.”
Read an Excerpt
The U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings Database
This file contains The U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings Database. The data are in Excel, R, SPSS, and Stata formats, compressed in a ZIP file. To download the database, click here: Download Data.
Replication Materials
This file contains the data and do files to replicate the empirical analyses in the book. The data are in Stata format, compressed in a ZIP file. The Stata code to replicate the models appears in the accompanying do files. To download the data and replication materials, click here: Download Data and Do Files.