Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-18-2015

Abstract

How do law and politics intertwine in Supreme Court adjudication Traditionally in law schools and political science departments scholars refused to mix law and politics Law professors insisted that legal texts and doctrines controlled Supreme Court decision making while political scientists maintained that political ideologies dictated the justices votes In the late twentieth century some scholars in both disciplines sought to combine law and politics but still conceived of the two as distinct They attempted to stir law and politics together but ended with an oilandwater type of mix law and politics settled apart The best approach as presented in this Article is an institutional interpretivism positing that politics is necessarily an integral part of legal interpretation and therefore Supreme Court decisions making Institutional interpretivism has significant ramifications For scholars it suggests that future research should explore the lawpolitics dynamic The potential of this approach is demonstrated with an analysis of the Affordable Care Act Case Meanwhile for Supreme Court justices institutional interpretivism suggests that the justices will continue to decide cases as before by sincerely interpreting legal texts and doctrines Politics is so deeply embedded in the judicial process that in most instances the justices do not consciously consider their political ideologies Yet institutional interpretivism reveals that the justices naturally decide in accord with their politics Law and politics are joined so cohesively in a stable emulsion that the justices do not even see their politics at work

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57

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