Presidential Address: The Supreme Court and the South

Abstract

In late 2000, the full import of the role of the Supreme Court in the political system was realized when, by the narrowest of margins, five Justices effectively decided the outcome of the November presidential election. In a case that presented the Court with issues of states rights, the proper role of the federal judiciary, and even the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, the reputedly judicial activist adverse majority failed to see the irony of ruling that the Florida Supreme Court had incorrectly interpreted Florida law.' Bush v. Gore (2000), which originated in a Southern state, had impact far beyond the state of Florida and highlighted the highly political role of federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. Clearly, the Supreme Court of the United States can never again be referred to as the least dangerous branch of government. There is no question that the Court can disturb the political equilibrium by injecting new or rediscovered social problems or policy alternatives into the national dialogue (Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997, 1247). While de facto selection of a president is not per se a policy alternative, a whole host of policies from abortion to education to taxes, as well as the future composition of the Court, will be affected by the Court's decision in Bush v. Gore. This decision in many ways crystallized my general level of discomfort with the state of judicial politics research. As a student of constitutional law, I believed that many in the judicial politics subfield had traded an understanding in the richness of the output of the courts for the opportunity to explain why decisions already made were made without much attention to the actual politics of the Court or the implications of its output. The creation and distribution of the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database, which includes 40 fields of infor-