Unpacking the Idea of the Judicial Center G
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NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 83 Number 5 Locating the Constitutional Center, Centrist Article 2 Judges and Mainstream Values: A Multidisciplinary Exploration 6-1-2005 Unpacking the Idea of the Judicial Center G. Edward White Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation G. E. White, Unpacking the Idea of the Judicial Center, 83 N.C. L. Rev. 1089 (2005). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol83/iss5/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized administrator of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNPACKING THE IDEA OF THE JUDICIAL CENTER G. EDWARD WHITE* This Article describes the principal ways in which the idea of the judicial center has been articulatedin the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing connections between shifting formulations of the idea and the jurisprudentialperspectives driving commentary on the Supreme Court by political scientists, journalists, and legal scholars. It then seeks to explain, in light of that description, why the idea of the judicial center is currently perceived by many commentators as an important point of departure for their observations on the dynamics of the Rehnquist Court. It concludes with some observations about how one might sharpen an understanding of the idea of the judicial center through further scholarly investigations. INTROD U CTION .....................................................................................1090 I. JUDICIAL BEHAVIORALISM AND THE IDEA OF THE CENTER IN THE 1940s ................................................................1097 A. Behavioralism and Voting Alignments on the Supreme Co urt ....................................................................................1097 B. Voting Alignment Analysis and the JudicialCenter ........1105 C. JudicialBehavioralism and the "Activism"-"Restraint" Debate in PoliticalScience .................................................1112 1. The Reconfiguration of Judicial Labels .....................1112 2. The Activism-Restraint Debate and the Judicial C en ter ............................................................................1115 II. JUDICIAL BEHAVIORALISM AND PROCESS THEORY IN THE 1950S AND 1960s ................................................................1117 A. The Transformation of the Activism-Restraint Categories ............................................................................1120 B. Elevating the Ideological Stakes of the Activism- R estraint Debate ..................................................................1122 C. The Collapse of the Idea of the Center in Legal * David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law. My thanks to Elizabeth Magill for her comments on an earlier draft and to Bethany Bryant for research assistance. 1090 NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 83 Scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s ...................................1126 D. JudicialBehavioralism and the Idea of the Center in PoliticalScience Literaturein the 1950s and 1960s ..........1127 1. Scaling A nalysis ............................................................1127 2. Scaling and the Idea of the Judicial Center ...............1130 E. The Idea of the JudicialCenter in the Late 1960s ............1132 III. THE IDEA OF THE JUDICIAL CENTER IN THE 1970s .............1134 A. The Emergence of the Term "Centrist"............................ 1136 1. The Burger Court as Centrist ......................................1140 IV. THE 1980s: THE IDEA OF A JUDICIAL CENTER EXPANDS.. 1146 A. Centrism and A ctivism .......................................................1147 1. Centrist Activism on the Burger Court ......................1149 2. Centrist Activism and Commentary ...........................1151 3. Im plications ...................................................................1153 V. THE IDEA OF THE CENTER ON THE REHNQUIST COURT ....1155 A. The "Center Holds" Thesis ................................................1158 B. Centrist Judging and the Atmospherics of the Rehnquist C o u rt ....................................................................................1162 VI. U NFINISHED BUSINESS .............................................................1168 A. ClarifyingJudicial Behavioralism..................................... 1168 B. Clarifying Centrism as a PoliticalIdeology ......................1172 C. Clarifying CentristJurisprudence ...................................... 1175 CO N CLU SIO N ................................................................................. 1185 INTRODUCTION In 1995, New York Times correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote an article whose first sentence identified "[t]he birth struggle of a new era" on the Supreme Court.' Greenhouse suggested that "[1long-held assumptions about the authority of the national government, the relationship between Washington and the states, and the ability of the Federal Government to take race into account in making public policy, were all placed on the table for dissection."2 She claimed that, "[a]n ascendant bloc of three conservative Justices with an appetite for fundamental, even radical change, [had driven] the Court on a re-examination of basic Constitutional principles" in the 1994 Term.3 Greenhouse's article was entitled "Farewell to the Old Order in 1. Linda Greenhouse, Farewell to the Old Order in the Court, N.Y. TIMES, July 2, 1995, at El. 2. Id. 3. Id. 2005] UNPACKING THE IDEA 1091 the Court," and its headline stated, "The Right Goes Activist." The article, however, was not just about the "unstable [and] riveting" actions of a "conservative bloc" on the Court.4 It was also about the fact that, according to Greenhouse, "[t]he center all but disappeared from the Court this term."5 Two Justices nominated by President Bill Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, were "widely expected to help anchor a strong central bloc." 6 But "there turned out to be virtually no center for these two experienced Federal judges to anchor [as they] joined a Court that, far from converging toward the center, was driven by competing visions of the Constitution and the country."7 As the "center" of the Court vanished, Greenhouse suggested, Ginsburg and Breyer found themselves "on one side [of a] divide" on constitutional issues, along with Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.8 The other side included the "ascendant bloc," composed of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justices Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, plus "conservative" Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, on whom the ascendant bloc of Justices "could usually count ... in nearly all the term's most important contested cases."9 The "center" of the Court was "a void," Greenhouse announced." In applying the terms "center" and "central bloc" to Supreme Court Justices, Greenhouse was drawing on several decades of scholarship in which those terms had come to be used as encapsulations of the postures of Justices. The use of the terms had evolved over those decades, and by the time Greenhouse employed them, the terms could have been understood as having any of three possible meanings. One meaning of "center" was spatial. The term located the position of a Justice on a Court based on the voting pattern of that Justice in a sample of cases. The sample typically involved cases raising constitutional issues, or other issues with discernible policy implications, that resulted in nonunanimous decisions. The location of a Justice-in a "left," "right," or "center" position on the Court- was determined by attaching ideological labels to outcomes in the cases, then tabulating the Justice's endorsement of those outcomes. 4. Id. 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. Id. 8. Id. 9. Id. 10. Id. 1092 NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 83 Such tabulations resulted in the identification of some Justices at the "center" of a Court because their votes in the sampled cases tended to alternate, in a roughly equal fashion, between "left" (or "liberal") and "right" (or "conservative") outcomes.11 Greenhouse's article used, "as a rough measure of the Court's ideological polarities," the opposing positions of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Stevens in nonunanimous cases.12 Rehnquist and Stevens were on opposite sides in thirty-five such cases, and Greenhouse took it as self-evident that Rehnquist's voting position, in all the cases, could be characterized as right of center, and Stevens's as left of center. 3 She then examined the alignment of other Justices with Rehnquist or with Stevens. This produced findings, for the 1994 Term, in which some Justices, such as Breyer, who voted sixteen times with Rehnquist and eighteen times with Stevens, or Souter, who voted fourteen times with Rehnquist and twenty times with Stevens, appeared closer to the "center" of the Court than other Justices, such as Thomas, who voted thirty-three times with Rehnquist, and Ginsburg, who voted twenty-three times with Stevens.14 The spatial meaning of the idea of a "center" on the Court was drawn from the technique of voting alignment analysis, which was originally introduced into commentary on the Court by behavioralist political scientists."5 It will be important to distinguish this meaning of judicial center from a second meaning of the concept that Greenhouse used in her article. That meaning