Chapter 12 Exercises

These exercises build on Chapter 12's framework: Article III architecture, justiciability, judicial review, the federal court hierarchy, the politics of selection, and the contested empirical question of whether federal judges are umpires or partisans-in-robes. Several require web access; sources are provided. The point is not to confirm a preferred answer but to engage the materials seriously.

Exercise 1 — Locate yourself in the federal judicial system

Go to the U.S. Courts site at uscourts.gov and find the "Court Locator" tool. Enter your zip code or city.

  1. Identify the federal judicial district in which you live. (e.g., "Eastern District of Michigan," "Southern District of Texas.")
  2. Identify the federal circuit that includes your district. (e.g., the Sixth Circuit, the Fifth Circuit.)
  3. Find your district court's website. Note the number of authorized judgeships and how many vacancies exist as of the date you check.
  4. Find your circuit court's website. Identify the chief judge of the circuit and the number of authorized judgeships.

Write 200–300 words describing what you found. End by reflecting on this: most Americans cannot name their federal judges. Most cannot name the chief judge of their circuit. Why? What does that say about the relationship between the federal courts and the public? Is that a feature, a bug, or both?

Exercise 2 — Trace a recent confirmation vote

Choose a federal judicial nominee confirmed (or rejected) in the past three years. Good options include any Supreme Court justice from 2017 onward, or any circuit court judge confirmed by your senators. Use the Senate Judiciary Committee's website (judiciary.senate.gov) and the Senate's roll-call vote records (senate.gov/legislative/votes_new.htm).

For your chosen nominee:

  1. Identify the date of nomination and the date of confirmation (or rejection or withdrawal). Compute the time-to-confirm in days.
  2. Identify whether the nominee received a hearing, and if so, on what date. If a Supreme Court nominee, summarize one substantive question asked and the answer given.
  3. Identify the committee vote (yes/no/by party).
  4. Identify the floor vote (yes/no/by party). What was the margin?
  5. Compare the time-to-confirm to median figures from the 1980s (typically 60–90 days).

Write 300–400 words. Compare what you found with the chapter's discussion of how confirmation patterns have changed since 2013. Did your nominee's confirmation reflect those trends? In what specific ways?

Exercise 3 — Read a Supreme Court opinion structurally

Read either Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), or Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000). Both are available free at oyez.org or supreme.justia.com. Both are surprisingly readable; Marbury is short.

Identify and label the following parts of the opinion:

  1. The statement of facts — who did what to whom, procedurally.
  2. The questions presented — what legal issues the Court is deciding.
  3. The holding — what the Court actually decides on each question. (The holding is the binding rule the case stands for.)
  4. The dicta — discussion that does not directly resolve the case. Dicta is not binding precedent. It can be persuasive but not controlling.
  5. Any concurring opinions (separate opinions agreeing with the result). What does the concurrence add or subtract?
  6. Any dissenting opinions. What is the dissent's central argument?

Write 400–500 words mapping these elements onto the case. End by identifying one passage you would describe as holding and one passage you would describe as dicta, and explaining why.

Exercise 4 — Steel-man originalism with one specific case

Pick a recent Supreme Court case decided primarily on originalist grounds. Good candidates include District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), or NFIB v. OSHA (2022). Read the majority opinion (or at least its first 15 pages) at oyez.org.

In 400–500 words:

  1. Identify the specific historical evidence the majority relies on (text, founding-era practice, ratification debates, Reconstruction-era understanding for Fourteenth Amendment cases).
  2. Reconstruct the strongest argument for why this historical evidence justifies the outcome. Use the originalist's own framing — fixed meaning, popular sovereignty, judicial restraint.
  3. Identify one weakness an honest originalist would acknowledge.
  4. Be careful not to argue against the position. The exercise is to present it on its strongest terms, the way Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas would.

Exercise 5 — Steel-man living constitutionalism with one specific case

Pick a recent Supreme Court case decided primarily on living-constitutional or substantive-due-process grounds. Good candidates include Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), or Roper v. Simmons (2005). Read the majority opinion (or at least its first 15 pages).

In 400–500 words:

  1. Identify the doctrinal foundation the majority relies on (substantive due process, evolving standards of decency, the Ninth Amendment, common-law constitutionalism).
  2. Reconstruct the strongest argument for why eighteenth-century language must be applied to twenty-first-century circumstances with some interpretive evolution. Use the living constitutionalist's own framing — Strauss, Brennan, Balkin.
  3. Identify one weakness an honest living constitutionalist would acknowledge.
  4. Again — present the position on its strongest terms.

The combination of Exercises 4 and 5 should produce two strong steel-mans of incompatible interpretive philosophies. That is the point. Until you can argue for both, you do not understand the disagreement.

Exercise 6 — Analyze the Sunstein empirical evidence

Read Cass Sunstein, David Schkade, Lisa Michelle Ellman, and Andres Sawicki, Are Judges Political? (Brookings 2006), at least the introduction and one substantive chapter. (Excerpts and summaries are widely available; the Brookings press summary is freely available online.)

In 400–500 words:

  1. Summarize the central empirical claim: federal judges' votes correlate with appointing-president party.
  2. Describe the panel effect: panels of three judges with mixed-party composition produce less polarized outcomes than panels with same-party composition.
  3. Identify the strongest methodological objection to Sunstein's findings. (Examples: case-selection effects, the difficulty of measuring "ideological" outcomes, the question of whether correlation implies causation.)
  4. Articulate the strongest formalist response — that legal craft is real and constraining even given the statistical regularity.
  5. State your own honest assessment. The reading should not push you toward "judges are partisans"; it should push you toward "interpretive choices have ideological valence."

Exercise 7 — Find the controlling case

Pick a contemporary legal dispute in the news. Examples (as of early 2026): a state law restricting transgender medical care for minors, a federal preemption challenge to a state climate regulation, a First Amendment challenge to a social-media regulation, an administrative-law challenge to an agency rulemaking.

For your chosen dispute:

  1. Identify the principal Supreme Court precedents the case turns on. (Scotusblog and the SCOTUSblog "Petitions of the Week" feature are good starting points.)
  2. For each precedent, identify the holding and how it applies to the present dispute.
  3. Identify any circuit splits — disagreements among the federal circuits about how to apply the precedent.
  4. Predict (with reasoning) how the Supreme Court would likely rule, given current composition.

Write 400–500 words. The point is to see how legal doctrine is actually applied — not as a clean deduction from rules, but as a contested process of analogizing to precedent and arguing about which case controls.

Exercise 8 — Democracy Audit: pending federal litigation in your district

Go to your federal district court's website. Many districts publish dockets and case lists. PACER (pacer.gov) requires registration and small fees but is the comprehensive source. The Free Law Project's CourtListener (courtlistener.com) provides free access to many federal court documents.

Find one pending federal case in your district that involves a constitutional or statutory question of public significance. (Civil-rights cases, environmental cases, election-administration cases, regulatory challenges, and constitutional challenges to state laws are all good candidates.)

In 300–400 words:

  1. Describe the parties and the claims.
  2. Identify the judge assigned to the case. Look up the judge's appointment history (which president, which year, prior career).
  3. Identify the stage the case is at (motion to dismiss, discovery, summary judgment, trial, appeal).
  4. Predict, based on the chapter's discussion of how interpretive philosophy and appointing-president party correlate, how the judge is likely to rule on the central legal question.
  5. Note: this is a prediction exercise, not an indictment. Even if your prediction proves correct, that does not mean the judge decided in bad faith. It means that interpretive choices have ideological valence — which is the chapter's central point.

Add this case to your Democracy Audit folder. Track it through the rest of the semester. Watching a real federal case unfold in your district is the best way to internalize how the federal courts actually work.

Exercise 9 — Map the justiciability doctrines onto a real dispute

Pick a recent dismissal of a high-profile lawsuit on justiciability grounds. Examples include Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins (2016, standing), TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez (2021, standing), Rucho v. Common Cause (2019, political question), or Murthy v. Missouri (2024, standing in the social-media-government-coordination case). Locate the opinion at oyez.org or supreme.justia.com.

In 300–400 words:

  1. Identify which justiciability doctrine the Court applied (standing, ripeness, mootness, or political question).
  2. Explain the threshold problem the Court found with the plaintiff's case — was the injury too speculative? Was there no causal connection? Was the matter committed by the Constitution to a political branch?
  3. Identify the substantive question the Court declined to reach by dismissing on justiciability grounds. What constitutional question did the dismissal leave unanswered?
  4. Articulate the strongest left-coded and right-coded critique of the dismissal. Critics across the spectrum have argued that justiciability doctrines have become gatekeeping devices that allow the Court to avoid politically uncomfortable questions; the question is whether the application is consistent across cases or whether it tilts in one direction.
  5. End with your own assessment: was the dismissal a principled application of Article III's case-or-controversy requirement, or a pretextual avoidance of a difficult constitutional question?

Exercise 10 — Compare two overrulings of precedent

Pick one overruling celebrated by liberals (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overruling Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), or Lawrence v. Texas (2003) overruling Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)) and one overruling celebrated by conservatives (e.g., Citizens United v. FEC (2010), Janus v. AFSCME (2018), Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), or Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024)).

For each case, in roughly 250 words apiece (500 total):

  1. Identify the prior precedent that was overruled and the year it was decided.
  2. Identify the stare decisis factors the Court actually addressed in deciding to overrule (workability, reliance, doctrinal coherence, factual changes, quality of reasoning).
  3. Identify the strongest argument for why this overruling was principled rather than political. Use the majority's own reasoning at its strongest.
  4. Identify the strongest argument for why this overruling was political rather than principled. Use the dissent's own reasoning at its strongest.
  5. Compare the two cases. Are the arguments structurally similar? Different? Does the doctrine of stare decisis operate the same way regardless of which side the overruling cuts?

The exercise's payoff is in the comparison. If you find yourself defending one overruling and attacking the other on identical analytical grounds, that is worth noticing. The point is not to conclude that all overrulings are political — sometimes precedent is genuinely wrong and should be overruled. The point is to apply the same standards consistently regardless of which way the case cuts.

Exercise 11 — The blue slip and senatorial courtesy in your state

Find out the current state of the blue slip practice for district court nominations in your state. Different Senate Judiciary Committee chairs have applied the practice differently. Look up the most recent district court confirmation in your state.

In 250–300 words:

  1. Identify your state's two senators and their party affiliations.
  2. Identify the most recent district court judge confirmed in your state. When was the nominee announced? When confirmed?
  3. Did the home-state senators support the nomination? Did they sign blue slips? (The Senate Judiciary Committee maintains records.)
  4. If your state's senators are from the opposite party of the appointing president, was the blue slip honored? If from the same party, was the consultation honored?
  5. Reflect: the blue slip is a Senate norm, not a constitutional requirement. The current practice can change with the next chair of the Judiciary Committee. Is that flexibility a feature or a bug? Should the blue slip be codified, or should it remain a discretionary practice?

Note on these exercises

These exercises are designed to be completed across the chapter's reading, not in a single sitting. Several require web access and primary-source reading. The deeper purpose is to move from passive understanding of how the federal courts are described to active engagement with how they actually work — reading opinions structurally, tracking confirmations as they unfold, and recognizing that the choices judges and senators make in real cases are not abstractions but specific decisions with consequences.

Three exercises (1, 8, and 11) connect explicitly to the Democracy Audit project that runs through the textbook. Add each one's deliverable to your Democracy Audit folder as you complete it.