John P. Collins, Jr. (The George Washington University Law School) has posted The National Court of Appeals: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Or, How We Abolished the Fifth Circuit) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
We are facing a crisis of confidence in our federal courts. Polarization in the judicial selection process and partisanship in judicial decision-making have yielded a steep decline in the public’s trust of the judicial branch. In response, many have focused reform efforts towards the Supreme Court, the public approval rating of which has hit an all-time low. But as important as Supreme Court reform is, that focus misses a bigger picture. The vast majority of cases go no further than the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals, which suffer from the same polarization and politicization but without the same level of public scrutiny. I intend to explore in this Article whether a single, centralized intermediate federal appellate court would alleviate the problems generated by stacked, partisan regional circuits, and methods by which this reform could be accomplished.
