Exercise 1: Nine Justices as Convention, Not Constitutional Requirement — Possible Solution ================================================================================================================== The chapter draws a direct parallel between the Supreme Court's size and Chapter 3's own finding about the House of Representatives, so the strongest answer uses both halves of that parallel together with FDR's own real attempt to test it. WHY IT'S CONVENTION, NOT REQUIREMENT Article III of the Constitution establishes "one supreme Court" but never specifies how many justices sit on it. The actual number has always come from ordinary federal statute, set and reset by Congress itself, not by any constitutional rule: - 1789 (original Judiciary Act): 6 justices - 1807: expanded to 7 - 1837: expanded to 9 - 1863: expanded to 10 - 1869 (Judiciary Act of 1869): settled at 9, where it remains today Four separate changes across less than a century show plainly that Congress always had, and used, the legal authority to resize the Court. The number nine is simply the figure that has held, by pure convention, for over 150 years since the last change. WHAT FDR'S 1937 ATTEMPT PROVES Roosevelt's court-packing plan is the single clearest real test of how strongly that convention is actually defended. Frustrated that the sitting Court had struck down several New Deal programs, FDR proposed adding a new justice for every sitting justice over 70 who declined to retire - a plan that could have grown the Court to as many as 15 justices, all appointed by him, effectively letting him overpower the existing bench through sheer numbers rather than through the normal one-vacancy-at-a-time appointment process. The proposal failed decisively: the Senate rejected it 70-20, and crucially, FDR's own party led the opposition rather than backing a president from their own side. The Senate Judiciary Committee itself called defeating the plan "essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy." That result shows the nine-justice convention isn't merely unchallenged out of inertia - when a sitting president with real political capital directly tried to break it for transparently self-interested reasons, Congress, including his own party, actively defended the convention rather than letting it be overridden. ANSWER: Nine justices is a matter of convention because Article III never sets a fixed Court size - Congress has changed the number by ordinary statute four times in US history (6, 7, 9, 10, then back to 9 in 1869), proving the legal power to resize the Court has always existed. FDR's real 1937 court-packing plan shows that convention is nonetheless strongly defended: his own proposal to expand the Court in his own favor was rejected 70-20, with his own party leading the opposition, showing Congress will actively resist an attempt to alter the Court's size for self-serving political reasons even though it has the legal authority to do so. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It separates the legal fact (Congress can change the number; it has done so four times) from the political fact (Congress nonetheless strongly resists an obviously self-interested attempt to change it), using FDR's real, specific 70-20 vote and cross-party opposition as concrete evidence for the second half of the claim.