numbers of cases. These reforms also would reduce the power of any single individual on the Court, though by themselves they would not meaningfully reduce the power of the Court as a whole within the U.S. system of constitutional government. The proposals aimed more directly at distributing the partisan or ideological affiliations and identities of the Justices could help reduce the stakes of the nomination and confirmation processes and in turn make the Court less of a source of political acrimony, particularly proposals that would give each President a specific number of appointments each term. These types of reforms also squarely acknowledge the political implications of the Court’s decisionmaking, but they do not directly address the scope of the Court’s power. Ultimately, however, though these proposals may have real benefits, those benefits may not be sufficiently significant or assured to justify the dramatic reconceptualization of the Article III judiciary they would require.
1. Policy Analysis of Rotation and Panel Proposals
a. Rotation Proposals. Proposals that would call for the rotation of Justices on and off the Supreme Court involve changing the membership of the Court on some sort of semi-regular basis; judges would alternate between actively hearing the cases of the Supreme Court and serving on the courts of appeals. Justices would be drawn according to a sorting process from a considerably larger collection of Article III judges—a set that could include all Article III judges or a prescribed subset of those judges. That larger set of Justices would be formally designated Supreme Court Justices serving during good behavior from the time of their appointment, but only a smaller subset of these judges would function as the Supreme Court of the United States in any given “case” or “controversy.”[186]
By expanding the number of Justices who would sit on the Court, rotation proposals reduce the power of any single individual over the outcomes of the Court’s cases. Rotation would thus address the need for litigants to gear their strategies toward the predilections of a single Justice perceived as the swing vote and would reduce the power of a single swing voter on the Court (though not necessarily a moderate swing “bloc”) from shaping the trajectory of the Court’s doctrine.[187] In addition, by incorporating a greater number of judges, these proposals could help regularly rejuvenate the Court by consistently introducing greater diversity of perspective, interpretive approach, and professional and geographic background, among other things, into its decisionmaking. Taken together, these features of rotation systems might enhance the quality of the Court’s decisionmaking or the Court’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public by extending decisionmaking power over matters of great consequence beyond the same nine individuals, though the Court would still be composed of Article III judges with
