Table of Contents

I. What Happened

Then and Now

The Party Demands: Party Agendas for the Supreme Court

Selecting How to Select: Presidents and Organizational Design

The Candidates for the Court and the Nominees

Interest Groups

The Media, co-authored with Leeann Bass and Julian Dean

Public Opinion

Decision in the Senate

II. Why it Happened

The Logic of Presidential Selection, co-authored with Lauren Mattioli

What the Public Wanted

Voting in the Shadow of Accountability: Senators' Confirmation Decisions

III. How It Matters, and What the Future Holds

New Politics, New Justices, New Policies: The Courts That Politics Made

The Future: The Courts that Politics May Make

What Future Do We Want? Evaluating Judicial Independence

Conclusion

About the Author

Charles M. Cameron is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency, and legislatures. The author of numerous articles in leading journals of political science, he is also the author of Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power, which won the American Political Science Association's Richard
F. Fenno Jr. Prize and the William H. Riker Award. He was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

Jonathan P. Kastellec is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are in American political institutions, with a particular focus on judicial politics and the politics of Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Journal of Law, Economics & Organization;
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies; and Political Research Quarterly.

Reviews

Making the Supreme Court uses judicial nominees to investigate larger changes in American politics over the last century, enduring questions about the administrative state, political parties, citizens, interest groups, and lobbying-not to mention nettlesome debates about voter rationality, the downstream effects of partisan polarization, and plenty more besides. Keenly perceptive and abundantly inquisitive, Cameron and Kastellec have delivered a tour de force that is sure to have a major impact on our understanding of all of American politics.
*William Howell, Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics, The University of Chicago*

Making the Supreme Court is a game changer. It describes and analyzes the entire appointments process with the goal of explaining why Supreme Court nominations transformed from low to high salience events, and how this transformation affects the contemporary court. Because, on the authors' account, the transformation touched every aspect of the process-from the president's approach to selecting nominees to the media's coverage of the proceedings-an expansive approach was required. And Cameron and Kastellec take on the task with gusto. For each change they posit, they dig in, ultimately developing a compelling mix of evidence connecting the transformation to the Court and its decisions-meaning that Making the Supreme Court's contributions transcend the selection of justices; the results help us make sense of the behavior of the contemporary court.
*Lee Epstein, University Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Southern California*

An exemplary analysis of a hugely important political phenomenon: the evolution of a strongly partisan, and likely, very stable court. How did this happen? The authors argue that the answer is found in appointment politics, writ large. Supreme Court appointments are examined and explained systemically, from the vantages of presidents, senators, justices, media, voters, the past, present, and the futures too. Powerful analytic tools and models are developed and deployed, alternative theories are carefully examined and eliminated, and the results are persuasive. Making the Supreme Court is a definitive account that seems likely to last as long as the current court majority.
*John A. Ferejohn, Samuel Tilden Professor of Law, New York University School of Law*

Cameron and Kastellec's Making the Supreme Court is deeply researched and thought-out, and both theoretically and historically sophisticated. It will in short order become the key work on Supreme Court appointment politics.
*Josh Chafetz, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center*

The book's discussion of the evolution of procedural dynamics is supported by relevant graphs, tables, and surveys. This book will become a classic illustration of the use of empirical analysis for explaining public policy.
*Choice*

The book is a great success. Cameron and Kastellec's analyses of the many stages in the construction of the Supreme Court are separately well-done and, together, stack into a solid account of Supreme Court appointments. The authors' data will circulate widely, stimulating new empirical research in judicial politics well beyond the problems of nominations and confirmations, and their theoretical arguments will exert substantial gravity on the study of appointment politics going forward. The book is well worth a place in any graduate or advanced undergraduate course on judicial politics, but students and scholars of the presidency, Congress, and public management would also learn much from it.
*Joseph Ura, Congress & the Presidency*

Making the Supreme Court...stands alone as the most ambitious empirical analysis of how the Supreme Court is constructed politically. No other books come close to matching its exhaustive analyses of the data pertaining to how presidents, senators, interest groups, and party leaders and activists construct the composition and direction of the nation's highest Court. ... To say the least, no one who wishes to learn from or do any seriously empirical work on the shaping of the Supreme Court can ignore it.
*Michael J. Gerhardt, Political Science Quarterly*