Supreme Court Party Time by Linda Greenhouse
'The Federalist Society’s celebration of Brett Kavanaugh is a reminder that social control can shape the way justices approach their jobs.
The Federalist Society celebrated the four Supreme Court justices in attendance at its annual gala in Washington last week, including the newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who received a minute-long ovation when his name was announced.
The banquet was a victory lap for the conservative lawyers’ organization that has provided the Trump administration with dozens of judicial nominees, notably including the two now sitting on the Supreme Court. At last year’s gala, a grateful Justice Neil Gorsuch thanked the group “from the bottom of my heart for your support and prayers” for his 2017 confirmation.
Justice Gorsuch was there again this year, along with two other Federalist Society regulars, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. One of the dinner speakers, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, acknowledged the obvious when he said to laughter and applause: “Some have accused President Trump of outsourcing his judicial selection process to the Federalist Society. I say, damn right!”
Reading accounts of the banquet, this thought occurred to me: Yes, it was a celebration, but it was also an exercise in control.
Not actual control, obviously, but social control, the not so subtle message of the evening being: We’ve been here for you, and we expect you to be here for us. If you want to come back, don’t disappoint us.
Can social control of that sort really matter to a life-tenured Supreme Court justice who has already achieved everything an ambitious lawyer could possibly want? Well, yes — and to be clear, in making that claim, I’m not suggesting that the desire for continued acceptance by one’s social network is a trait that afflicts only conservative judges. But the network that counts now is the one that has finally captured the Supreme Court.
In a fascinating new book titled “The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court,” to be published early next year, two prominent students of judicial behavior, Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum, explore the Supreme Court’s current polarization through the lens of social psychology. They take issue with the common assumption that the court responds to a broadly defined public opinion. Rather, the authors identify as the “primary influence” on individual justices not the mood or expressed desires of the public at large but rather “the elite world in which the justices live both before and after they join the Supreme Court.” They write, “The justices take cues primarily from the people who are closest to them and whose approval they care most about, and those people are part of political, social and professional elites.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/opinion/supreme-court-federalist-society.html?
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