The refusal of U.S. courts to decide cases that involve politics is unique and potentially harmful, Columbia Law Professor Jamal Greene told an audience of 200 at the Connecticut Law Review\u2019s annual symposium on October 9, 2020.<\/p>\n
Using Canada, Israel and India for comparison, Greene noted that the highest courts in those countries don\u2019t avoid political questions. The United States, he said, is alone in the world in how its courts often refuse to address these issues, claiming they are best left to other branches of government.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court\u2019s landmark decision in\u202fBush v. Gore<\/em>, a holding that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election, stepped into the political arena. But negative reaction to that decision caused the court to fortify its avoidance of future political questions, Greene said, and that has\u00a0left\u00a0serious political problems such as partisan gerrymandering for other branches.<\/p>\n The symposium is an annual event at the UConn School of Law, presented by the student-run Connecticut Law Review. The 2020 symposium, \u201cEmpires or Umpires? Political Questions, Separation of Powers and Judicial Legitimacy,\u201d was the first the law review has hosted entirely online. In addition to Greene\u2019s keynote address, attendees heard from three panels of experts, each of which looked at the topic from a different angle.<\/p>\n The first panel examined the history of the political question doctrine, and panelists discussed the role of public opinion in shaping that history. The second panel\u2019s topic was the Supreme Court case\u202fRucho\u202fv. Common Cause<\/em>, a 2019 decision where the court held that partisan gerrymandering is a political question, and therefore outside the court\u2019s jurisdiction. The final panel addressed different theories of judicial decision-making.<\/p>\n Among the speakers on the third panel was Richard Robinson, chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.\u00a0\u201cI love doing these things where I learn a lot more than I teach,\u201d\u00a0he said, laughing.<\/p>\n Dean Eboni S. Nelson began the event by thanking those in attendance and noting the timeliness of the event. It was held just days before the beginning of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, and less than a month before a nationwide election. Nelson said she couldn\u2019t think of a more pressing topic than America\u2019s courts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe heard from the nation\u2019s leading scholars on a topic that could not be\u00a0more timely, said Professor Douglas Spencer, the symposium\u2019s faculty advisor.\u00a0\u201cThe student editors, Jillian Chambers and Qing Wai Wong, deserve all of the credit; they facilitated multiple rehearsals with the panelists and managed different waiting rooms where the panelists assembled prior to presenting.\u201d<\/p>\n Chambers\u00a0\u201821 and Wong\u00a0\u201821 said they were pleased with how seamlessly the event ran and appreciated how much knowledge and passion speakers brought.<\/p>\n \u201cThe panel discussions went better than we could have imagined,\u201d Wong said. \u201cHaving panelists and moderators who were willing to engage with the online format made the whole event possible and coordination much easier.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The refusal of U.S. courts to decide cases that involve politics is unique and potentially harmful, Columbia Law Professor Jamal Greene told an audience of 200 at the Connecticut Law Review\u2019s annual symposium on October 9, 2020. Using Canada, Israel and India for comparison, Greene noted that the highest courts in those countries don\u2019t avoid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":165288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1857],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2158],"class_list":["post-165287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 06:30:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165289,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165287\/revisions\/165289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/165288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165287"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=165287"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=165287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}