The Supreme Court’s long, hot summer

Gonna be a long summer. Orin Kerr has some interesting (but mildly contradictory) musings on O’Connor’s resignation. Of particular interest: Supreme Court advocacy in the last decade has focused a great deal on trying to understand the mind of SOC, as she was the swing vote in many big cases. That learning has just become ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Gonna be a long summer. Orin Kerr has some interesting (but mildly contradictory) musings on O’Connor’s resignation. Of particular interest:

Supreme Court advocacy in the last decade has focused a great deal on trying to understand the mind of SOC, as she was the swing vote in many big cases. That learning has just become obsolete…. O’Connor’s retirement may shift the Court a lot less than people think. In the big ideological cases of the last Term, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote as often as (or maybe even more often than) Justice O’Connor. Let’s assume for now that O’Connor is replaced by a consistently more conservative Justice; even if that’s true, the left-of-center Justices presumably still have 4 very reliable votes and a good shot at picking up a 5th vote with Kennedy. Plus, new Justices are hard to predict, and it’s often hard to tell whether a new Justice will vote consistently one way or another.

Brian Fletcher at SCOTUSblog has a roundup of initial reactions. They’ve also set up a Supreme Court Nominations blog that will undoubtedly be worth checking out.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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