would be wise. As a Commission we have endeavored to articulate the contours of that debate as best as we understand them, without purporting to judge the weight of any of the arguments offered in favor or against calls to increase the size of the Court.
IV. Other Structural Reforms
At points in history, and in today’s debate over Supreme Court reform, lawmakers and commentators have proposed different schemes for altering the composition of the Court beyond its basic expansion. In this Chapter, we focus on three categories of such reforms: proposals that would rotate the Court’s membership; proposals that would introduce panels into the Court’s decisionmaking; and proposals designed to ensure partisan or ideological balance on the Court.
The first set of reforms would structure the Supreme Court as a shifting or rotating set of nine (or more) Justices from among a larger set of Article III judges. The details of rotation schemes vary, but generally speaking, they would provide that judges rotate between service on the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. Some subset of these judges would constitute “the Supreme Court” in a given case or controversy, or for designated periods of time.[145]
The second type of reform would have the Justices sit on panels to hear cases. A panel system could take a variety of forms: For instance, one subset of Justices might be entrusted to decide questions falling within the Court’s “original Jurisdiction” and another subset of Justices might be empowered to hear appeals (that is, cases reviewing decisions of the lower courts).[146] Or, one subset of Justices might be entrusted to resolve statutory questions and another subset could be entrusted to decide constitutional issues.[147] Or, the Justices might sit in randomly assigned panels on any given case, much like the judges of the courts of appeals today. Such a panel system could be instituted with the Court as currently constituted with nine Justices, or it could be employed as a way to manage the decisionmaking of an expanded Court. In either case, the system could be designed to enable all of the Justices to sit en banc, or all together, to review the decisions of a single panel when necessary.
The final set of reforms would distribute partisan or ideological influence over the Court’s composition in an attempt to achieve evenhandedness. One such proposal would authorize each President to appoint two Justices to the Court during a four-year term. Another proposal would design the appointments process to ensure that a roughly even number of Justices would
