Restraining the Court: Assessing Accounts of Congressional Attempts to Limit Supreme Court Authority

Abstract

We propose a multilevel account of legislative Court curbing in order to assess existing explanations as to why such proposals come about. We argue that although Court curbing is commonly seen as the result of institutional conflict between Congress and the Supreme Court, it is best understood as a product of three interrelated factors: the individual motivations on the part of lawmakers, the partisan context in which they operate, and institutional disagreements between Court and legislature. We find evidence that micro‐level factors offer an important insight into Court curbing that institution‐focused explanations alone cannot.