| The American judiciary was not born independent, autonomous, and powerful; rather, it had to become so, largely through a continuous process that was both politically determined and politically consequential. In this dissertation, I examine the causes and consequences of that process from 1789 to 1939. I argue that the process of "judicial institution-building" is motivated by three goals held by legislators: substantive policy interests, consolidating partisan strength and preserving electoral support, and maintaining a functionally efficient judicial branch. I demonstrate how a combination of political constraints often inhibits significant reform of the institutional judiciary and explicate the conditions under which those constraints might be overcome. In particular, I focus on two catalysts of reform: elections that result in fundamental changes in the political environment and strategic action by political entrepreneurs. Throughout the project, I present a historically rich narrative that not only describes the institutional development of the judiciary but also offers analytically grounded explanations of how it happened, why it happened when it did, why it happened in the form it did, and why, from the perspective of American constitutional democracy, it mattered at all. |
