2/2: #Bestof2021: Court-packing in the 21st Century; and what is to be done? @RichardAEpstein @HooverInst (Originally posted October 28,, 2021)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
@Batchelorshow
1868
2/2: #Bestof2021: Court-packing in the 21st Century; and what is to be done? @RichardAEpstein @HooverInst (Originally posted October 28,, 2021)
https://www.hoover.org/research/supreme-court-commission-comes-through
Richard A Epstein, @RichardAEpstein Tisch Professor of Law NYU Bedford Senior Fellow; Hoover Institution; senior lecturer, University of Chicago Law School.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I Am The World. I'm John Baxter with Professor Richard Epstein, a senior fellow |
| 0:09.2 | of the Hoover Institution, Roddy Get Defining Ideas. After the court, after the report |
| 0:15.6 | by the commission charged by the President of the United States to examine compliance |
| 0:20.1 | about the Supreme Court, now a constituted nine members and said to be six to three in |
| 0:27.0 | favor of the conservatives. So that is a moving number and I will say generally it's complicated. |
| 0:32.4 | We come now to reforms that are in proportion to some of the complaints about the court |
| 0:38.8 | these many years by either side by all sides. Richard, you focus this on the matter of |
| 0:44.4 | the term that a Justice serves. Right now it's for life when you tell me the average age |
| 0:51.4 | for that for life is 30 years. What is to be done Richard? Well, if you look to every |
| 0:57.2 | other court around the world, it turns out that nobody gets life tenure anymore. People |
| 1:02.4 | have realized that it's just too long a term. You need some rotation in office. You're |
| 1:07.4 | worried about people becoming genuinely senile or loising some of their powers as they |
| 1:11.5 | get older. It's not true about everybody. It's only true about some people, but you certainly |
| 1:16.4 | don't want that. You have to try to make individual judgments. People are very nervous about |
| 1:21.1 | asking people to step down when they think they've passed. Some will do it. Some will not. |
| 1:26.6 | So what everywhere else is you have this kind of limit. So let me give you an illustration |
| 1:31.0 | inside the United States. We have Article 3 judges have life time tenure and it doesn't |
| 1:36.9 | matter so much when you're talking about quarters of appeals, but because they just too many |
| 1:41.3 | judges for anybody to have this kind of decisive decision. But when we start creating specialized |
| 1:46.4 | court, the uniform practice in the United States is to put together what we call article |
| 1:51.0 | 1 courts, the courts for taxation and bankruptcy, where the terms are around 15 years. And everybody |
| 1:57.1 | seems to think that this is the far better way to do things. And we cheat a little bit |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

