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 contrarian view that uses both empirical data and stories culled from more than seventy years of transcripts to demonstrate that the hearings are a 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.
Brief description: Paul M. Collins is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on judicial politics, with a particular interest in the democratic nature of the courts. The recipient of numerous research awards, he has published articles in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Journal of Politics, Law and Social Inquiry, the Law and Society Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, Political Research Quarterly and other journals. Collins is also the author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making, which received the 2009 C. Herman Pritchett Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.
Review Quotes: "Conventional wisdom suggests that confirmation hearings of the Supreme Court justices before the Senate Judiciary Committee are broken, but Collins and Ringhand present a sophisticated, empirically grounded argument that suggests that they are not ... This book is a game changer. Summing up: highly recommended."
J. R. Vile, Choice