Chapter 14 Exercises

These exercises ask you to engage with the actual Supreme Court — its current docket, the most recent confirmation, the actual voting patterns of recent terms — rather than to memorize the chapter. Some require small original research. Some require you to steel-man positions you may disagree with. All assume you have read the chapter carefully.

Exercise 14.1 — Your Senators' Confirmation Votes

Find out how each of your two U.S. senators voted on the four most recent Supreme Court confirmations: Gorsuch (2017), Kavanaugh (2018), Barrett (2020), and Jackson (2022). The roll-call votes are publicly available at senate.gov.

Write a short analysis (300-500 words) that answers:

  1. Did your senators vote consistently along party lines on all four confirmations? If yes, what does that tell you about the modern confirmation process? If no, which votes were the exceptions, and what reasons did those senators give at the time?
  2. If your state's senators have changed since 2017, compare the voting patterns of the predecessors and successors. Has your state's representation in confirmation votes shifted with party turnover, or have specific senators (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin) deviated from the party-line pattern?
  3. What does your senators' voting pattern suggest about whether the chapter's claim — that confirmations are now near-totally party-line — applies to your state's representation?

Exercise 14.2 — Track an Oral Argument

Visit oyez.org or supremecourt.gov and find an oral argument from the current Supreme Court term that has been argued but not yet decided. Listen to or read the full argument transcript (typically 60-90 minutes total).

Write a 500-700 word analytical brief that:

  1. Identifies the legal question presented (in plain English, not legalese).
  2. Notes which justices asked the most questions of each side and what their questions seemed to focus on.
  3. Predicts the likely outcome based on the questioning and explains your reasoning.
  4. Returns to your prediction after the case is decided (when the term concludes) and notes whether you were right and what you missed.

This exercise teaches a basic civic skill: reading the Court as it actually operates, not through media filtering.

Exercise 14.3 — Analyze the Most Recent Term's 5-4 Cases

Using the SCOTUSblog statistics page or a similar source, compile the list of all 5-4 (or 6-3) decisions from the most recent completed Supreme Court term. For each case:

  • Note the lineup (which justices were in the majority, which in dissent).
  • Categorize the case area (constitutional law, statutory interpretation, administrative law, criminal procedure, etc.).

Then answer:

  1. What share of the term's contested cases broke along the standard 6-3 (Republican-appointed majority, Democratic-appointed dissent) line?
  2. What share crossed ideological lines, with Republican-appointed justices joining Democratic-appointed in the majority or vice versa?
  3. Which justices crossed over most often? On what kinds of cases?
  4. Does the data support the chapter's description of the Court as "ideologically predictable but with meaningful exceptions on specific kinds of cases"?

A short paper (600-800 words) presenting the data and your conclusions.

Exercise 14.4 — Steel-Man Court Reform

Choose ONE court reform proposal from Section 14.10 — court packing, term limits, jurisdiction stripping, or binding ethics rules. Write two short essays (400-500 words each).

Essay A: The strongest possible argument FOR the proposal. Steel-man it. Cite the specific institutional concerns the proposal addresses, the historical precedents (where they exist), and the most thoughtful proponents. Do not mention any objections to the proposal.

Essay B: The strongest possible argument AGAINST the proposal. Steel-man it. Cite the specific institutional concerns the proposal would create, the unintended consequences proponents may underweight, and the most thoughtful opponents. Do not mention any benefits of the proposal.

Then add a one-paragraph self-assessment: which essay was harder to write, and what does that tell you about your own priors?

This exercise is designed to force you outside your starting position. The reform you find easiest to defend is the one whose costs you are probably underweighting; the reform you find easiest to attack is the one whose benefits you are probably underweighting.

Exercise 14.5 — Democracy Audit: Supreme Court Cases Affecting Your Area

Identify three Supreme Court cases from the 2020-2025 period whose holdings have direct legal or policy effects in your state, county, or city. (Examples: a case affecting state abortion law in your state, a case affecting voting administration in your county, a case affecting environmental regulation of a major industry near you.)

For each case:

  • Summarize the holding in 100-200 words.
  • Identify the specific local impact (which laws have changed, which agency rules have been altered, which kinds of enforcement have shifted).
  • Identify the local political response (state legislative action, gubernatorial action, ballot measure campaigns, litigation in lower courts).

Then write a 400-500 word reflection: in what ways has Supreme Court activity reshaped governance in your immediate area? Are these changes the kind of thing that, before this chapter, you would have associated with "the Supreme Court"?

This is the chapter's contribution to the running Democracy Audit project: understanding how the Court's national rulings translate into local political and governance outcomes.

Exercise 14.6 — Read a Concurrence and a Dissent

Pick a recent Supreme Court decision in which there were both a notable concurrence (a justice agreeing with the majority's outcome but writing separately to say so on different reasoning) and a dissent.

Read the majority opinion, the concurrence, and the dissent (or at least the syllabus and the first ten pages of each). Then write 600-800 words that:

  1. Summarize the legal question and the majority's holding.
  2. Explain what the concurrence is doing — which majority reasoning is the concurring justice declining to endorse, and what alternative reasoning is the concurrence offering?
  3. Explain the dissent's central objection. Is it methodological (the dissent thinks the majority used the wrong analytical framework), substantive (the dissent thinks the majority applied the framework wrong), or jurisprudential (the dissent thinks the majority departed from precedent it should have followed)?
  4. Identify which approach — majority, concurrence, or dissent — you find most analytically convincing, and why.

This exercise teaches a skill: reading judicial opinions as legal arguments rather than as policy statements. The methodology matters as much as the outcome.

Exercise 14.7 — Compare Two Confirmations

Pick two Supreme Court confirmations from different eras — one from 1975-1995 and one from 2017-2022. (Examples: Stevens 1975 vs. Gorsuch 2017; Kennedy 1988 vs. Kavanaugh 2018; Ginsburg 1993 vs. Jackson 2022.)

For each, document:

  • The vote margin.
  • Which senators of the opposing party voted to confirm.
  • The major substantive questions raised in the hearings.
  • The role of organized interest groups (left, right, or both) in the confirmation campaign.

Then write 700-900 words on what has changed and what has stayed the same. Has the substantive scrutiny of nominees increased, decreased, or just become more partisan? Have organized advocacy campaigns become more or less influential? Has the Senate's institutional norm of cross-aisle confirmation eroded uniformly, or in fits and starts?

Exercise 14.8 — Shadow Docket Tracker

Find five shadow-docket rulings from the last twelve months. (The Stephen Vladeck website shadow-docket.org is one resource; SCOTUSblog also tracks emergency applications.) For each:

  • Summarize the application (what was being asked, which lower-court ruling was being challenged).
  • Identify the Court's disposition (granted, denied, with explanation, without explanation).
  • Note any separate opinions or dissents.
  • Identify the substantive area of law affected.

Then write 600-800 words assessing: based on these five rulings, does the shadow docket appear to be functioning primarily as the framers' "emergency" docket — handling truly time-sensitive applications that cannot wait — or as a substantive doctrine-making forum that operates outside the merits process? Or both? Cite the specific rulings to support your assessment.

Exercise 14.9 — The Methodology Exercise

Pick one Supreme Court decision from the last five terms (2020-2025) that you find substantively troubling — one whose outcome you disagree with. Read the majority opinion carefully (or at least the syllabus and the first ten substantive pages). Then write a 600-800 word essay that does the following:

  1. Identify the methodology the majority used (originalism, textualism, history-and-tradition, common-law constitutionalism, pragmatism).
  2. Construct the strongest possible methodological argument for the majority's approach. Do not engage your substantive disagreement; engage only the methodology. Why is the methodology the correct one for this kind of question? What does it offer that other methodologies do not?
  3. Identify a different decision — from the same Court or an earlier one — where the same methodology produced an outcome you find substantively agreeable. Use this to test whether your discomfort with the first decision is methodological or substantive.

This exercise is designed to teach a discipline: distinguishing legal craft from policy preference. It is one of the hardest things to do in constitutional analysis. Most professional commentators on the Court fail at it routinely. Doing it well is one of the markers of serious constitutional literacy.

Exercise 14.10 — A Conversation Across Standpoints

Find one conservative legal scholar's analysis of a recent Supreme Court decision and one liberal legal scholar's analysis of the same decision. (The Volokh Conspiracy is a good source for conservative analysis; Slate's legal coverage, the Strict Scrutiny podcast, or the Take Care blog are good sources for liberal analysis. Adam Liptak's New York Times coverage often presents both sides.) For the same decision, read both analyses carefully.

Then write 500-700 words that:

  1. Identify the points of agreement between the two scholars. Where do they share a description of what the case is about, what the legal question is, what the holding does?
  2. Identify the points of substantive disagreement. Where do they part ways on what the case means, why it was decided as it was, and what its implications will be?
  3. Identify the points of methodological disagreement. Are they applying different analytical frameworks?

The goal is to develop the skill of reading multiple commentators on the same decision and synthesizing their analyses rather than picking the one whose conclusion matches your priors. This is a practical citizenship skill; it generalizes to every area of contested public policy.

A Concluding Note

These exercises will collectively take 15-25 hours to complete carefully. That is appropriate for a chapter whose subject is one of three federal branches and whose recent decisions reshape American law. Doing the exercises is doing the chapter; reading the chapter without doing the exercises is reading about, not understanding. Pick whichever exercises engage you most. Do them well.

The chapter has tried to present the Court — its structure, its operation, its membership, and the contemporary debates about it — in a way that is honest about institutional facts and balanced about contested normative questions. The exercises are designed to push beyond reading. They ask you to look at actual senators' votes, actual oral arguments, actual Supreme Court rulings affecting your community. They ask you to steel-man positions you may not personally hold. They ask you to read commentary from across the political spectrum on the same decision. Each of these is a habit. Cultivated over time, they produce a citizen capable of engaging the Supreme Court the way the Court actually exists — as an institution operating in real time, on real cases, with real consequences for real people, including you.