TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Apr 9, 2021

President Joe Biden signed an executive order today establishing a commission to study whether to add seats to the Supreme Court and other reform proposals, The Hill reports. The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States will be chaired by former White House counsel Bob Bauer and Cristina Rodríguez, a Yale law school professor and former deputy assistant attorney general, and be comprised of 36 members. The group is tasked with examining the genesis of the reform debate and the court’s role in a constitutional system. It also is asked to analyze a number of reform proposals regarding the membership and size of the court, length of service for justices, the process for choosing cases, and current rules and practices. Read more from the executive order and the White House press release.

In related news, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer warned this week that adding justices to the high court would cause “eroding” of trust in the court. In a two-hour address at Harvard Law School, he said public acceptance of court decisions, and more fundamentally, the rule of law, is threatened by such reform proposals. SCOTUSblog has more and a link to a video of the speech.