Judicial Power in a Political World
This concluding chapter synthesizes the book's main findings about the architectonic politics of judicial institution building and contextualizes them within contemporary debates. It also reflects upon the lessons of the more than 200-year historical lineage of the institutional judiciary for our understanding of judicial power in America. More specifically, it considers the place of the federal judiciary in America's past and future in empirical and normative terms, respectively. It argues that both political rhetoric and academic exegesis about the Supreme Court embody a fundamentally incorrect presumption about the judiciary being external to politics, and that such presumption leads to a series of misconceptions about the relationship between judicial power and democratic politics. The chapter offers a conception that not only locates the judicial branch squarely within the political arena but also places substantially greater emphasis on its cooperation rather than conflict with other actors and institutions in that arena.