Judges and Juries, Part 1

At the Revolution, the chief judges of ten of the thirteen colonies sided with George III rather than George Washington. Akhil Reed Amar argues that fact shapes all of Article III.

This lecture explains why the judiciary gets one chapter where Congress and the presidency each got two: because the written Constitution says less about it, and because judges share Article III with juries. Amar reads the three articles as a record of the Revolution. Congress must be representative because the fight was over taxation without representation. The presidency borrows the monarchy's strengths without its heredity. And the courts come last because judges were the Crown's men while juries, assemblies, and militias were the patriots'. He then lays out the democratic pyramid running through the document, in which more accountable bodies choose less accountable ones: presidents pick judges, judges do not pick their chief, and Congress sets the size of the Court and the rules it follows. The lecture closes on Federalist 78, life tenure, and the open question of how robust a judicial review the framers actually had in mind.