***LEGITIMACY DA***

***NEG***
 1NC
Legitimacy high now
Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
There is a bevy of evidence that the Court’s support is stable over time. Gibson, Caldeira and Spence
(2003b), relying upon repeated cross-sectional samples of the American people, found that support for
the Court was unaffected by its highly controversial ruling in Bush v. Gore, and the institution
maintained its high level of diffuse support even after the ruling. Likewise, in their year-long panel
survey surrounding the Alito confirmation, Gibson and Caldeira (2009) find “a) reasonably high levels of
support for the Court, and b) a great deal of stability in responses across the waves of the panel” (99).2
Thus, there is substantial reason to believe that the Court’s support is stable over time.

The plans reversal of court precedent crushes legitimacy

Fowler & Jeon 8 — James H. Fowler, Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego, AND Jeon
Sangick, Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, 2008 (“The authority of Supreme Court
precedent,” in Social Networks, Science Direct, January, Available online at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378873307000378, Accessed at 6/30/17, RKim)
Legal historians suggest that justices in the 19th Century responded to the crisis of legitimacy by strengthening the norm of stare decisis, a legal
norm inherited from English common law that encourages judges to follow precedent by letting the past decision stand ( Friedman, 1985, pp.
127–133). In order to foster compliance and enhance the institutional reputation of the Court, stare decisis
was implemented to place decision-making in the domain of neutral legal principles and the “accumulated
experience of many judges responding to the arguments and evidence of many lawyers” ( Landes and Posner, 1976, p. 250) rather than at
the whim of the personal preferences of individuals. To this day, the justices of the Supreme Court are
aware of the inherent weakness of the federal judiciary and place high value on maintaining their
institutional and decisional legitimacy through the use of precedent (Ginsburg, 2004, Powell, 1990 and Stevens, 1983).
Recognizing that legitimacy is essential to achieve their policy objectives, the members of the Court justify their substantive
rulings through court opinions, which allow the justices to demonstrate how their decisions are consistent with existing legal rules and
principles established in prior cases (see Hansford and Spriggs, 2006, pp. 24–30). Because it is the
application of existing
precedents that creates the perception of judicial decision-making to be procedurally neutral and fair ( Tyler
and Mitchell, 1994), these opinions are often considered to be the source of the Court's power ( Epstein and Knight,
1998 and Segal and Spaeth, 2002).

Legitimacy key to Democracy

Peretti 1999 — Terri J, Politcal Professor at Santa Clara, 1999 (“In Defense of a Political Court”,
Princeton University Press, Available online at http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6758.html, Accessed at
6/30/17, RKim)

Should the Court lose its legitimacy and, consequently, its power, we in turn lose the benefits that only the Court
can provide. Vitally important constitutional rights and liberties, as well as minority groups, would be
unprotected and would likely suffer at the hands of an indifferent or hostile majority. An additional loss of
paramount importance is the ideal and the reality of the rule of law. All government action would be reduced
to arbitrary will and force, rather than being justified according to reason and, thus, rendered legitimate.
The consequences of the Court losing its legitimacy and the ability to play its specialized role, if we are to believe Philip Kurland, are horrible
indeed.

US democracy credibility prevents global democratic backsliding

Kagan 2015 Robert, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Security, Jan, "Is
Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics" Brookings Institution,
www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/01/democracy-in-decline-weight-of-geopolitics-kagan
These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when
democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded
declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to
produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of
retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick
up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such
rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor yet behaving as democracies
in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—
by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of
democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents.
Meanwhile, insofar as there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from
would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these
autocracies and these aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the democracies react,
and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained. It should not be surprising that one
of the side
effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in
those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often but
not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker
nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before. Consider the interwar
years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War, contemporaries such as the
British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”[1] Yet almost
immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain,
were suffering the effects of the recent devastating war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to
the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic,
and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups
overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then
to a form of fascism. Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the
democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of
fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the
fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out. The
period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even
in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as
John A. Hobson observed.[2] Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form
of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of
difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something
that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than
democracies. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing
reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s
Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain
made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s
made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the
wars the democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s
Soviet Union. It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the Soviet Union) to reverse the trend
again. The United States imposed democracy by force and through prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South
Korea. With the victory of the democracies and the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit.
Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new
nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950,
the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent of the world’s population. Was
this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later
observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that
even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the
early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back
under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, more
than three-dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coups.[4] Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or
even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed that “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been
reached, noting the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic
governments (particularly the Soviet Union).”[5] But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s,
the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. What explained the
prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It could not have been merely the steady rise of the
global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. Neither economic growth nor human yearnings had
prevented the democratic reversals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth
between democracy and authoritarianism in a cyclical, almost predictable manner. What was most notable about the third wave was that this
cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy was interrupted. Nations moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?
The International Climate Improves The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from
the mid-1970s onward was simply more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than had been the case in
past eras. In his study, Huntington emphasized the change, following the Second Vatican Council, in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding
order and revolution, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and
attractiveness of the European Community (EC), meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations such as Portugal, Greece, and
Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These
norms increasingly became international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere or as the result of some natural evolution of the
human species. As Huntington noted, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the
most powerful country in the world.[6] The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was
not because U.S. policy makers consistently promoted democracy around the world. They did not. At various times throughout the Cold War,
U.S. policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted or was
complicit in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable—those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At times, U.S. foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. President Richard
Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[7] Nor, when the United States
did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Officials in President Ronald Reagan’s
administration came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies,
for instance. And often it was popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice that it would otherwise have preferred
to avoid, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Reagan would have
preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by the moral challenge of Filipino “people
power.” Rarely if ever did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles. Beginning in the mid-
1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led
by human-rights advocates, began to condition or cut off U.S. aid to authoritarian allies, which weakened their hold on power. In the Helsinki
Accords of 1975, a reference to human-rights issues drew greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in
the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human-rights abuses of the Soviet Union as well as of right-wing
governments in Latin America and elsewhere. The U.S. government’s international information services, including the Voice of America and
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after
first trying to roll back Carter’s human-rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated (if not
always its actual) policy. Even during this period, U.S. policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East,
were not only tolerated but actively supported with U.S. economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in U.S. policy, joined with the
efforts of Europe, was significant. The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution put an end to a half-century of
dictatorship. As Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and the European democracies played a key role,
making a “heavy investment . . . in support of the democratic parties.”[8] Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of
tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across
the globe. In 1978, Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when long-serving president Joaquín Balaguer refused to give
up power after losing an election. In 1983, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada restored a democratic government after a military coup. In 1986, the
United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election that he had lost. In 1989, President George H.W.
Bush invaded Panama to help install democracy after military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. Throughout this
period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it
urged presidents not to try staying in office beyond constitutional limits. Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a
half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru,
Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and
Taiwan.”[9] Many developments both global and local helped to produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there
might have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been
as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-
trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the socialist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution.
The greater activism of the United States, together with that of other successful democracies, helped to build a broad, if not universal,
consensus that was more sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian forms. Diamond and others
have noted how important it was that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and
agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the internal political processes of countries, making it harder for
authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient as
well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the
1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—some might even say
imposed—democratic principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements. Equally important was the role that the
United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S.
contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in
what might have been a natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the
usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the role of “catcher in the rye”—
preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third
wave unprecedented breadth and durability. Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern
Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet downfall may
be in dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and
technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw Pact countries themselves. They had long yearned to
achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. These peoples wanted
to join the rest of Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. That
Central and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the fruit of aspirations for freedom or
comfort. It also reflected the desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the
political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that wanted to be part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that
they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a
democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That a democratic, united, and prosperous Western
Europe was even there to exert a powerful magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S. actions after World War II. The Lost Future of
1848 Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1848.
Beginning in France, the “Springtime of the Peoples,” as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and
representatives of the rising middle class as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks, they toppled kings and princes and
shook thrones in France, Poland, Austria, and Romania, as well as the Italian peninsula and the German principalities. In the end, however, the
liberal movements failed, partly because they lacked cohesion, but also because the autocratic powers forcibly crushed them. The Prussian
army helped to defeat liberal movements in the German lands, while the Russian czar sent his troops into Romania and Hungary. Tens of
thousands of protesters were killed in the streets of Europe. The sword proved mightier than the pen. It mattered that the more liberal powers,
Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had sparked and inspired
the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more
concerned with preserving peace among the great powers than with providing assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European
balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was
suppressed.[11] As a result, for several decades the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism. Scholars
have speculated about how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of 1848 succeeded: How might
German history have unfolded had national unification been achieved under a liberal parliamentary system rather than under the leadership of
Otto von Bismarck? The “Iron Chancellor” unified the nation not through elections and debates, but through military victories won by the great
power of the conservative Prussian army under the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning
point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”[12] Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one that Bismarck taught—namely,
that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by blood and iron”?[13] Yet the international
system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the mid-
nineteenth century did not favor democracy, and so it is not surprising that democracy failed to triumph anywhere.[14] We can also speculate
about how differently today’s world might have evolved without the U.S. role in shaping an international environment favorable to democracy,
and how it might evolve should the United States find itself no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable,
even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of
moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually exerted by the reigning great powers, often determine
which direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what
might otherwise have been a “natural” evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic nations can help liberal forces that, left to their
own devices, might otherwise fail. In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their
success or failure was influenced by the balance of power at the international level. In the era of U.S. predominance, the balance was generally
favorable to democracy, which helps to explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States not been so
powerful, there would have been fewer transitions to democracy, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a
shallower and more easily reversed third wave.[15] Democracy, Autocracy, and Power What about today? With the democratic superpower
curtailing its global influence, regional powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common
in the environs of Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle East, where long dictatorial
traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings. But even in regions where democracies remain strong,
authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the
heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of illiberalism and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European
Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an
indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent
Mexico, democracy collapses under the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional
powers for not doing what they have never done.
Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has affected the fate
of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic superpower’s behavior that bears
most of the responsibility. If that superpower does not change its course, we are likely to see democracy
around the world rolled back further. There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal world order we have been living in
these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint of human progress. There are
those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one. Until now, however, they have not been able to have their way, but not
because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. Who is to say that Putinism in Russia or China’s particular brand of authoritarianism
will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of the continent? Autocracy in
Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it is autocracy, not democracy, that has been the
norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States, had the power to shape the world. Skeptics of
U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment has been tried over the past few
decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very infertile soils.
Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from impoverished India to “Confucian” East Asia to
Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy. Yet it should be clear that
the prospects for democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal world order,
supported and defended by a democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great powers.
Today, as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of
weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the weeds may
sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.

Democracy solves existential threats

Peiser 2007 Benny social anthropologist @ Liverpool John Moores University “Existential Risk and
Democratic Peace” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7081804.stm

In recent years, humankind

has become aware of a number of global and existential risks that potentially
threaten our survival. These natural and man-made risks comprise cosmic disasters, volcanic super-eruptions and
climatic disruption on the one hand, and nuclear warfare, technological catastrophes and fully-fledged
bioterrorism on the other. In order to secure the future of civilisation, we are challenged to recognise and
ward off these low-probability, but potentially destructive hazards. A new debate is gaining momentum about how
best to achieve a secure future for our planetary civilisation. The rise of neo-catastrophism The perception that disorder rather than harmony
held sway in the solar system gradually began to emerge during the 20th Century. The traditional concept of an essentially benign universe was
replaced by that of an unpredictable cosmos punctuated by global catastrophes. The emergence of scientific neo-catastrophism surfaced as a
corollary of the space age. Artist's impression of asteroid impact. Image: AFP/Getty There can be little doubt that we are living in an age of
apocalyptic angst and alarm Images of impact craters sent back by space missions in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the pock-marked, impact-
covered surface of many planets. At the same time, the identification of hyper-velocity impact craters on the Earth and empirical evidence of
half a dozen mass extinction events generated a new view of our planet as a fundamentally hazardous and catastrophic place in space. More
recently, predictions of
large-scale disasters and societal upheaval as a result of catastrophic climate
change, as well as growing apprehension about impending bioterrorism and nuclear warfare, have
become almost routine issues of international concern. There can be little doubt that we are living in an age of apocalyptic
angst and alarm. The existential risk paradox At the core of today's collective anxieties lies what I call the existential risk paradox. As advances
in science, medical research, genetics and technology are accelerating, human vulnerability to global hazards such as cosmic impacts, natural
disasters, famine and pandemics has significantly decreased. Simultaneously,
the proliferation of democratic liberalism and free
market economies around the world has dramatically curtailed the death toll associated with natural disasters and
diseases. A recent study confirms that the annual percentage of people killed by natural disasters has decreased tenfold in the last 40 years,
in spite of the fact that the average annual number of recorded disasters increased fivefold. Evidently, open and technological societies are
becoming increasingly resilient to the effects of natural disasters. Kari Marie Norgaard Read a view of the psychology of climate scepticism from
US scholar Kari Norgaard Inside the climate ostrich Yet the very same technologies that are serving us to analyse, predict and prevent potential
disasters have reached such a level of sophistication and potency that their misuse can transform vital survival tools into destructive forces,
thus becoming existential risks in their own right. The nuclear device that may protect us from a devastating asteroid impact can also be
employed for belligerent purposes. Genetic engineering that offers the prospect of infinite food supplies for the world's growing population can
be turned into weapons of bioterrorism. And without the global utilisation of fossil fuels we would lack all trappings of modern civilisation and
social progress. Yet, fossil fuels are regarded as dangerous resources that are widely blamed for economic tensions, wars and catastrophic
climate change. Existential risk perception There seems to be some correlation between media exposure and existential risk perception. The
more people see, hear or read about the risks of Near Earth Object (NEO) impacts, nuclear terrorism or global climate catastrophes, the more
concerned they have become. The mere mention of catastrophic risks, regardless of its low probability, is enough to make the danger more
urgent, thus increasing public estimates of danger. Scientists who evaluate risks are often torn between employing level-headed risk
communication and the temptation to overstate potential danger. Sunbather (BBC) Media called on 'climate porn' Chaotic world of climate
truth The inclination to amplify a possible risk is only too understandable. Personal biases, as well as grants and funding pressures, are
considerable motivating factors to hype a probable hazard; ;n many cases, funding is allocated on the basis of intense lobbying. This, in turn,
can tempt researchers to aggressively promote their specific "danger warning" via the mass media. Behind many alarms lurk vested interests of
research institutions, campaign groups, political parties, charities, businesses or the news media, all of whom vie for attention, influence and
funding in a relentless war of words. Professional risk analysts disapprove of such scare tactics, and point out that the detrimental affects of
apocalyptic-sounding alarms and the rise of collective anxieties are much costlier than generally presumed. Whether individuals regard
existential risks as a serious and pressing threat, or a remote and long-term risk, often depends on their psychological traits. Nobody has
appreciated this conundrum perhaps better than Sir Winston Churchill who famously said: "An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a
pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity." Doomsday argument In recent years, leading scientists in the UK, such as Brandon Carter,
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, have advanced the so-called Doomsday Argument, a cosmological theory in which global catastrophes
due to low-probability mega-disasters play a considerable role. This speculative theory maintains that scientific risk assessments have
systematically underestimated existential hazards. Hence the probability is growing that humankind will be wiped out in the near future. I
believe that the prophets of doom, including those predicting climate doom, are wrong Nevertheless, there are many good and compelling
reasons why human extinction is not predetermined or unavoidable. According to a more optimistic view of the future, all existential
risks can be tackled, eliminated or significantly reduced through the application of human ingenuity, hyper-technologies
and global democratisation. From this confident perspective of emergent risk reduction, the resilience of civilisation is no longer
restricted by the constraints of human biology. Instead, it is progressively shielded against natural and man-made disasters by hyper-complex
devices and information-crunching technologies that potentially comprise boundless technological solutions to existential risks. Current
advances in developing an effective planetary defence system, for example, will eventually lead to a protective shield that can safeguard life on
the Earth from disastrous NEO impacts. The societal response to the cosmic impact hazard is a prime example of how technology can ultimately
eliminate an existential risk from the list of contemporary concerns. A technology-based response to climate change impacts is equally feasible,
and equally capable of solving the problem. Global democracy as a solution But while most natural extinction risks can be entirely eliminated by
technological fixes, no such clean-cut solutions are available for the inherent potential threats posed by super-technologies. After all, the
principal threat to our long-term survival is the destabilising and destructive violence committed by extremist groups and authoritarian
regimes. Here, the solution can only be political and cultural. Enola Gay. Image: Getty Effective democracy may prevent man-made
catastrophes Fortunately, there is compelling evidence that theglobal ascent of democratic liberalism is directly
correlated with a steep reduction of armed conflicts. A recent UN report found that the total number of wars and
civil conflicts has declined by 40% since the end of the Cold War, while the average number of deaths
per conflict has dropped dramatically, from 37,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002. According to the field of democratic peace research,
the growing number of democracies is the foremost reason for the pacification of many international
conflicts. Democracies have never gone to war against each other, as democratic states adopt compromise solutions to
both internal and external problems. As Rudolph J Rummel, one of the world's most eminent peace researchers, has stated: "In
democracy we have a cure for war and a way of minimising political violence, genocide, and mass
murder." On balance, therefore, I believe that the prophets of doom, including those predicting climate doom, are wrong. Admittedly, there
is no guarantee that we can avoid major mayhem and disruption during our risky transition to become a hyper-technological, type 1 civilisation.
Even so, societal evolution has now reached a level of complexity that renders the probability of human survival much higher than at any
hitherto stage of history.
UNQ
 Unq - Legitimacy
Public support is sufficient to assure legitimacy now
Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
We are deluged with warnings that public support for American institutions has hit a nadir. Pew warned in July 2015 that “unfavorable
opinions of the Supreme Court have reached a 30-year high. And opinions about the court and its ideology have never been more
politically divided” (Pew Research Center 2015). Not to be left out, Gallup sounded the alarm in July 2016 that the Court’s support
matched a historic low and emphasized that the Court had not enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans since September 2010
(Jones 2016). This is alarming. Because they lack the power of the purse and sword, the judiciary is uniquely dependent on public
support for its efficacy (Nelson and Uribe 2017). Low public support threatens institutional health; courts who lack public support are
less able to achieve acceptance, implementation, and acquiescence to their decisions (Gibson, Caldeira and Baird 1998). In short, without
the support of the public, courts are impotent and unable to move their opinions from paper into practice. The most
important
form of public support is legitimacy, also termed diffuse support (Caldeira and Gibson 1992). The academic literature
on the Court’s legitimacy suggests that Pew and Gallup are the survey organizations that cried wolf.
Indeed, political scientists are continually reminded that the U.S. Supreme Court is “widely supported by the
American people” due to its deep and durable store of institutional legitimacy (Gibson 2007: 207). Indeed, the
notion that the Court’s legitimacy was so durable and so high has become a sort of folk wisdom among political scientists, even raising
the question of whether it was possible for the Court to obtain too much legitimacy (Gibson and Nelson 2014a). Studies have
documented high levels of diffuse support for the Court across repeated cross-sectional surveys (Gibson 2007), even finding that the
Court’s support remained unshaken
in the wake of highly politicized rulings, like its decision in Bush v. Gore (Gibson, Caldeira and Spence 2003a).1 At the same time,
recent empirical findings have implicitly challenged the conventional wisdom about the Court’s deep
and durable support, suggesting that support for the Court is more closely tied to performance satisfaction than earlier studies had
appreciated (Bartels and Johnston 2013). If legitimacy and performance satisfaction are tightly linked, then the Court’s support should
ebb and flow with the public’s satisfaction with its rulings. Indeed, evidence following the Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the
Affordable Care Act suggests that individual-level change
in diffuse support in response to the ruling is both tied
directly to performance satisfaction and is persistent (Christenson and Glick 2015).
 Unq – Uphold Precedent
Courts minimalist now – maintain precedent and avoid political decisions
Cass R Sunstein, Harvard Law professor, “Don't Expect the Supreme Court to Change Much”, Nov 9th
2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-09/don-t-expect-the-supreme-court-to-
change-much

The Donald Trump presidency, coupled with the new Congress, is likely to produce major changes in federal law. But for
the Supreme Court, expect a surprising amount of continuity -- far more than conservatives hope and progressives fear.
If, as expected, Trump is able to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, the court will look a lot like it did until Scalia died in
February: four relative liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor); two moderate
conservatives (John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy); and three relative conservatives (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the
new justice). That means it would reflect the same ideological makeup as the court that upheld Obamacare
and required states to recognize same-sex marriages. It would contain the same five justices -- a majority -- who recently
voted to uphold affirmative action programs and to invalidate restrictions on the abortion right. A court like that won't license a Republican-led
executive branch to do whatever it wants. It will assert the rule of law. It will rarely veer off in novel directions. To be sure,
things will be different if Trump is able to replace one of the liberal justices. Neither Ginsburg (who is 83) nor Breyer (78) is a spring chicken. But
they both appear to be in good health; don't be surprised if they continue to serve for the next four years. Suppose, though, that one of them
does resign. At that point, significant changes would be possible. But probably not many. One
reason involves the idea of respect
for precedent. The justices are usually reluctant to disturb the court's previous rulings, even if they
disagree strongly with them. In this light, would a new majority really want to announce in, say, 2018, that states can ban same-sex
marriage, after years of saying otherwise? That’s unlikely: Such an abrupt reversal of course, defeating widespread expectations, would make
the law seem both unstable and awkwardly political. Would a Trump court want to overrule Roe v. Wade, which has been the law since 1973,
and thus allow states to ban abortion? Considering the intensity of conservative opposition to abortion, that is somewhat more probable. But
judges are not politicians, and again to avoid the appearance of destabilizing constitutional law, any majority would hesitate before doing
something so dramatic. Would a court composed of Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and one or two Trump appointees be willing to grant
broad new powers to the president? No chance. The current conservatives have expressed a great deal of skepticism about executive authority.
They aren’t going to turn on a dime merely because the president is a Republican. There is a more general point. Many
judges (and
Roberts in particular) are drawn to “judicial minimalism”; they prefer to focus on the facts of particular cases.
Quite apart from respecting prior rulings, they like small steps and abhor bold movements or big theories. An
instructive example: In the 1970s, many progressives were terrified when President Richard Nixon found himself a position to transform a left-
of-center court, led by Earl Warren, and to appoint no fewer than four “strict constructionists.” And to be sure, the Nixon court, as it was
sometimes called, repeatedly disappointed the left. It halted the movement toward recognition of welfare rights, declined to expand the rights
of criminal defendants and refused to recognize a constitutional right to education. But the whole period is aptly described as “the counter-
revolution that wasn’t.” The Nixon court maintained a lot of continuity with its predecessor. Believing that the commitment to the rule of law
entails humility and respect for the past, it preserved most of its precedents, even as it refused to build on them. It’s true that with further
changes in the court’s membership, we should expect to see some incremental movements in the law, including expansions in gun rights,
increased protection of commercial advertising and new constraints on the power of regulatory agencies. But there’s
an excellent
chance that in four years, constitutional law will look pretty much the same as it does now.
 Unq – AT: Gorsuch
Gorsuch won't change court tendencies—that still preserves legitimacy.
Pierce 17 Rich Pierce, Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University. His work
been cited in hundreds of judicial opinions, including more than a dozen opinions of the U.S. Supreme
Court.3-19-2017, "What impact will Judge Gorsuch really have on the Supreme Court?," TheHill,
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-judiciary/324686-if-judge-gorsuch-is-confirmed-his-impact-
wont-be-as-large-as

Judge Gorsuch’s general tendencies are not likely to have a major effect on the pattern of Supreme Court
decisions in the near future, however, for three reasons. First, it is impossible to use any judge’s general tendencies as the basis to predict
with confidence how the judge will vote in any specific case. Even the most conservative judges vote to uphold many agency decisions to
regulate, and even the most liberal judges vote to reject some agency decisions to regulate.

Second, Judge Gorsuch’s voting patterns in regulatory cases are

likely to be similar to those of Justice Scalia.
Replacing one conservative justice with another conservative justice is likely to have little effect on the
high court’s general pattern of decisions. By contrast, replacing Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, or Justice Kennedy with a
conservative almost certainly would produce major changes. Those changes would include rejection of a much higher proportion of agency
decisions to regulate and announcement of new standards that lower courts must apply in regulatory cases that would produce a general
increase in the proportion of agency decisions to regulate that lower courts reject.
LINK
 Link - Precedent
Overruling settled precedent destroys the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.
Philip A. Hubbart 2005 (has a background as an appellate judge, a public defender and an adjunct
professor of law. He served for 19 years as a judge on the Third District Court of Appeal of Florida; 12
years as a public defender in Miami, Florida and Washington, D.C.; and over 30 years as an adjunct
professor of law in Miami teaching criminal law related courses. He is currently a member of the law
firm of Wetherington, Klein & Hubbart in Miami specializing in appellate practice) Making Sense of
Search and Seizure law: A Fourth Amendment Handbook; Pg 106// thxugacr
Still, the framework of past Fourth Amendment decisions on a specific issue limits the choices that the Court can make in a given case, as the
Court must necessarily make a reasoned case for accommodating the result it reaches in a way that logically appears within the scope of past
case law. Stated differently, as a practical matter no
Court, no matter what its judicial philosophy, can rewrite the law
announced in its past cases without losing public confidence. Theoretically, of course, it has the de jure
power to do so by overruling, artificially distinguishing or outright ignoring its prior relevant cases, willy-nilly. But if it did so, it
would bring upon itself an avalanche of public and professional criticism that it could not possibly
withstand. Indeed, impeachment proceedings might very well follow. The doctrine of stare decisis
necessarily means that the Court's basic reasoning process must be deductive from, and therefore generally
consistent with, its past relevant decisions. Although this framework is somewhat flexible in nature, it clearly has its limits
which, as a practical matter, restrict the Court's decision-making process.

Legitimacy based in precedents, overturning them wrecks support

Fowler 08
James H. Fowler, Ph.D in Government from Harvard and M.A. in IR from Yale; professor of Political
Science at UCSD; senior fellow on global justice at UCSD, The authority of Supreme Court precedent,
2008, Social Networks, Vol. 30(1), p. 16-30

Legal historians suggest that justices in the 19th Century responded to the crisis of legitimacy by strengthening
the norm of stare decisis, a legal norm inherited from English common law that encourages judges to follow precedent by letting the
past decision stand (Friedman, 1985, pp. 127–133). In order to foster compliance and enhance the institutional reputation of the Court, stare
decisis was implemented to place decision-making in the domain of neutral legal principles and the
“accumulated experience of many judges responding to the arguments and evidence of many lawyers” (Landes and Posner,
1976, p. 250) rather than at the whim of the personal preferences of individuals. To this day, the justices of the
Supreme Court are aware of the inherent weakness of the federal judiciary and place high value on
maintaining their institutional and decisional legitimacy through the use of precedent (Ginsburg, 2004; Powell,
1990; Stevens, 1983). Recognizing that legitimacy is essential to achieve their policy objectives, the members
of the Court justify their substantive rulings through court opinions, which allow the justices to demonstrate
how their decisions are consistent with existing legal rules and principles established in prior cases (see Hansford and
Spriggs, 2006, pp. 24–30). Because it is the application of existing precedents that creates the perception of judicial decision-
making to be procedurally neutral and fair (Tyler and Mitchell, 1994), these opinions are often considered to be the source of
the Court’s power (Epstein and Knight, 1998; Segal and Spaeth, 2002).
 Link – Political Decisions
Politicized Nature of the Decision Hurts Legitimacy
Michael J. Nelson and James L. Gibson, February 2016, Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Penn State and Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis, “U.S. Supreme Court
Legitimacy: Unanswered Questions and an Agenda for Future Research”
http://mjnelson.org/papers/RoutledgeChapter.pdf

Other research draws a distinction between political and politicized behavior. Gibson and Caldeira (2011) find that damage
to the
Court’s legitimacy comes not from sincere attitudinal decisionmaking but rather from strategic,
politicized decisionmaking. In other words, when the public believes that a decision is reached through a
principled decisionmaking process—be it legalistic or attitudinal—that decision does not harm the Court;
however, when the decision is a strategic one, then the public is likely to penalize the Court, most likely
because they view that behavior as politicized and akin to the behavior of ordinary politicians. This reasoning
fits well with other findings about public perceptions of politicized behavior and support for judicial institutions. Gibson (2012) presents a
multitude of evidence that the legitimacy of state judges is harmed when citizens equate them with “ordinary” politicians. In other words,
when judges are perceived as engaging in strategic behavior, then perhaps public support for the Court is harmed. In what may be the most
prominent recent example of high-profile strategic behavior at the Supreme Court, CBS News reported that Justice Roberts changed his vote in
the Court’s first ruling on the constitutionality of Obamacare, changing his position from one in which the law was unconstitutional to a position
that allowed him to uphold the law (Crawford 2012). Likewise, recent prominent commentary over the appropriateness of strategic retirement,
particularly as it relates to Justices Ginsburg and Breyer at the end of the Obama presidency, has provided high-profile public discussion about
the appropriateness of nonpolicy-related strategic behavior (Lithwick 2014; Kennedy 2011; Oliphant 2013). Indeed, research supports
the view that politicized behavior is harmful to the Court’s legitimacy. Christenson and Glick (2015), examining the
consequences of exposure to information about Roberts’s vote switch in the Obamacare case on changes in diffuse support for the Court, find
that survey respondents who read a news article alerting them to Robert’s strategic behavior decreased their support for the Court more after
the Obamacare decision than those who were not randomly assigned to learn about Roberts’s vote switch. Other evidence about the effect of
politicization on the Supreme Court comes from Gibson and Caldeira’s (2009) study of attitudes toward the Court during the Alito confirmation.
The politicization of the nomination campaigns—for and against Alito’s confirmation—affected the legitimacy of the Court itself. It seems that
the American people hold fairly realistic understandings of how their Supreme Court operates, but that
there is a line between ideology and politicization that, when crossed, threatens the basic legitimacy of
the institution. Thus, taken together, the literature suggests that the real danger to the Court’s legitimacy comes not
from political decisionmaking, but rather from politicized decisionmaking. Gibson and Nelson (2015b) tested this
proposition directly, attempting to untangle the effects of three components of specific support: subjective ideological disagreement, legal
realism, and perceptions of judicial politicization (see also Woodson 2015). They find support for this hypothesis, namely that the
effects
of perceived judicial politicization trump the magnitude of the effects of both subjective ideological
disagreement and legal realism. Moreover, Gibson and Nelson undercover an interactive effect among the three components of specific
support: ideological disagreement only has an effect on diffuse support for those individuals who are both legal realists and do not believe the
Court to be politicized. This finding fits well with the connection uncovered by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (1995), who find that increased
perceptions of congressional politicization have translated into the low levels of public support currently enjoyed by Congress.
 Link – Judicial Restraint
Maintaining Judicial Restraint is essential to court legitimacy
Powell 90 – Lewis F. Powell, Jr. 3-1-1990, “Stare Decisis And Judicial Restraint”, Vol. 47-Issue. 2-Article.
2- pg. 288 KKC
Looking to the decades ahead, several conditions are important to the future long term health of stare decisis. Speaking broadly, these
conditions all involve judicial
restraint. This means recognition that the Court's function is to decide cases involving
specific issues and particular parties. The Court does not sit to make announcements of abstract principles or to give advisory
opinions. Unnecessary resolution of broad questions always raises the stakes. It creates incentives for
future attacks on the Court's opinions. In each case the Court should focus specifically on the particular facts of the case and the
questions properly presented. Too often, Justices write more broadly than necessary to decide the case before the Court. Law clerks do not
make the decisions, but they often add expansive footnotes that a Justice may accept uncritically. In a subsequent case, the footnote will be
cited as the law.
 Internal Link - Snowballs
Decrease in court legitimacy snowballs
Grosskopf, 1998
https://business.highbeam.com/137812/article-1G1-21186966/do-attitudes-toward-specific-supreme-
court-decisions Anke Grosskopf, PhD in political science; specializing in international politics, Do
Attitudes toward Specific Supreme Court Decisions Matter? The Impact of Webster and Texas v. Johnson
on Public Confidence in the Supreme Court, 1998, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3, p. 4
If reaction to Supreme Court decisions affects subsequent opinion about the Court, does this necessarily imply that esteem for the Court will tend to be lessened by
the Court's actions? The answer is no if we assume that the Supreme Court benefits from its popular rulings to an extent sufficient to offset antipathy toward its
unpopular rulings. This, however, is a rather bold assumption, and one that is supported by neither relevant theories of decision making nor past empirical research.
Social psychologists have shown a tendency of people to weigh negative information more heavily than
positive information in various cognitive tasks, a phenomenon commonly known as a "negativity bias" (e.g., Fiske 1980;
Pratto and John 1991; Skrowonski and Carlston 1987, 1989). We believe that such a bias may affect judgments about the Supreme Court.

The dominance of negative evaluations has been demonstrated in the world of politics by Lau (1982, 1985), who showed that the impact of negative

information on candidate approval was some three times stronger than that of positive information in congressional campaigns between
1968 and 1980. Lau (1985) argues that the existence of a negativity bias in the evaluation of political leaders is partly a perceptual phenomenon. Political leaders are
expected to behave in a positive manner, and thus people see nothing extraordinary nor even particularly commendable when politicians behave properly. Negative
information stands out, however, because it runs contrary to our expectations. In recent research consistent with this view, McGraw and Steenbergen (1995) find
that participants in a laboratory experiment remembered more negative than positive information about the study's hypothetical congressional candidates.
IMPACT
 Turns the Case
Lack of legitimacy means Court can’t enforce its decisions
Kevin Burke, August 23, 2013 (“How Low Public Trust Threatens the Legitimacy of Court Decisions,”
http://proceduralfairnessblog.org/2013/08/23/how-low-public-trust-threatens-the-legitimacy-of-court-decisions/, Accessed 7/8/2015, rwg)

Trust is an essential component of procedural fairness, which, in turn, has been shown to be a key source of legitimacy for
decision-makers. All public institutions now face serious skepticism from the public about their trustworthiness. However, a trust
deficit – and the resulting lack of legitimacy – are of particular threat to the judiciary. Legitimacy is
essential if courts are to be respected and, indeed, if court orders are to be obeyed. Simply put, failure to
maintain and enhance the legitimacy of court decisions imperils the judiciary as an institution and the
vital role assigned to the judiciary in our Constitutional tradition.
 Ext – Democracy I/L
Maintaining “Stare decisis” is key to preserve Court legitimacy—that’s key to
democracy
Gentithes 9 (Michael Gentithes Research Attorney, Illinois Appellate Court, First District; J.D. DePaul
University College of Law 2008; B.A. Colgate University 2005., 8-13-2009, “In Defense of Stare Decisis,”
Williamette Law Review, accessed 7-14-2017)

II. WHY THE STRENGTH OF A COUNTRY’S HIGHEST COURT IS VITAL TO PRESERVING A DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM

Below, I argue that stare decisis allows the Supreme Court to earn the respect of the people and the coordinate
branches of government. But a discussion of how the Court maintains popular respect is only relevant when framed by the significance of that
respect itself. The
judiciary’s strength, meaning its ability to render decisions that are respected throughout the country, is
absolutely paramount to successful democracy. This point can be illustrated by a comparison of recent political history in the
United States, Pakistan, and Kenya.
 Ext – Democracy Impact
Democracy solves war
Diamond 95 (Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and
Imperatives, Carnegie Commission, December 1995,
http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/PDF/Promoting%20Democracy%20in%20the%20199
0s%20Actors%20and%20Instruments,%20Issues%20and%20Imperatives.pdf)
Other Threats. This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful
international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of
tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source
of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional
threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its
provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion
do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or
glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are
much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build
weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable,
open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for
investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to
protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and
because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect
competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law,
democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a
new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
 Legitimacy Key to Hegemony
Legitimacy key to hegemony
Knowles 09, (Robert Knowles, professor at New York University Public Law, American Hegemony and
the Foreign Affairs Constitution, 41 Ariz. St. L.J. 87 2009)
This Article offers a new model for assessing appropriate judicial deference in foreign affairs that takes account of American-led order. By
maintaining consistent interpretation of U.S. and international law over time and providing virtual representation for other nations and non-
citizens, U.S.courts bestow legitimacy on the acts of the political branches, provide public goods for the world, and
increase America's soft power - all of which assist in maintaining the stability and legitimacy of the
American-led hegemonic order. This "hegemonic" model substantially eliminates the problematic deference gap between
foreign and domestic cases and enables courts to appropriately balance foreign affairs needs against other
separation-of-powers goals by "domesticating" foreign affairs deference. The hegemonic model also has explanatory and predictive
value. In four recent cases addressing habeas claims by alleged enemy combatants, the Supreme Court rejected special deference. 13 It refused
to defer to the executive branch [*92] interpretations of foreign affairs statutes and international law, and even asserted military exigencies.
The hegemonic model justifies this recent rejection of special deference and explains why it could augur increased judicial involvement in
foreign affairs. The interpretive scope here is limited. The hegemonic model is functional but concerns overall
governmental effectiveness in foreign affairs, not the appropriate allocation of power with respect to any particular policy. Nor do I
analyze the appropriate allocation of foreign affairs powers between the President and Congress, although the hegemonic model has many
implications for this relationship as well. Finally, I do not address formalist - e.g., originalist - arguments for or against special deference. The
hegemonic model provides insights that should be considered in conjunction with the teachings of text, structure, and history. 14

Heg solves extinction

Barnett, Professor, Warfare Analysis and Research Dept – U.S. Naval War College, 3/7/’11 (Thomas, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue
Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” )

Let me be more blunt: As

the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force for
peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed
the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there
would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing
equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America
stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced
the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of
empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly
10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts.
 Rule of Law Impact
Court intervention into political realm breaks down institution legitimacy and the rule
of law
Stack, 96 (Kevin M, Associate Dean of Research @ Vanderbilt Law and Vice-chair of the Separation of Powers Committee
for the Administrative and Regulatory Practice Section of the ABA, “The Practice of Dissent in the Supreme Court, Yale Law
Review, June, lexis)

One aim of constitutional theory is to establish a principled connection between the practices, opinions, and judgments of the
Supreme Court, and the ideal of the rule of law. The extraordinary powers of the Court make this project both compelling and
difficult. When the Court strikes down acts of legislatures, the Court threatens to advance not the rule of
law, but rather that of the particular individuals on its bench. The Court's own shifts in opinion,
particularly shifts that accompany changes in its membership, similarly threaten the Court's connection
to the rule of law. For the Court to serve successfully [*2237] as the guardian of the rule of law, there must be a principled connection
between it and this ideal. The question of whether the ideal of the rule of law can provide a justification for the practice of dissent requires
examining the Court's connection to this ideal. For dissent is an element of the Supreme Court's institutional practice, and as such, it cannot be
justified independently from a conception of the Court's link to the rule of law. That is, any justification of dissent based on an appeal to the
ideal of the rule of law would have to be part of a conception of the Court's association with that ideal. In this part, I investigate two
approaches to establishing a connection between the Court and the ideal of the rule of law, and argue that the practice of dissent challenges
both of them. The first, which I call the
institutional approach, emphasizes the ways in which the institutional
voice of the Court discourages an appearance of conflict with the ideal of the rule of law. I take my depiction
of this approach from the recent work of Paul Kahn. n5 The second, which I call the interpretive approach, constructs a
conception of objectivity or determinacy in adjudication; the application of such a conception to the
Court recommends its consistency with the rule of law. n6 For this approach, I examine the theory of judicial
interpretation that Ronald Dworkin presents in Law's Empire. n7 These two approaches correspond to what I take to be two principal aspects of
the ideal of the rule of law. The
interpretive approach addresses the requirement of the rule of law that legal
decisions stand in a certain sort of justificatory relation to legal principles that themselves have an
established political pedigree. The institutional approach attends to the requirement that legal decisions
not appear to be relative to the particular individuals who make them. The institutional and interpretive approaches
thus emphasize different features of the Court's practice as well as these different aspects of the ideal of the rule of law.

Rule of law’s crucial to uphold unipolarity and maintain hegemony

Knowles ’09 Robert Knowles, Acting Assistant Professor, New York University School of Law, Spring, 2009, ARIZONA STATE LAW
JOURNAL, 41 Ariz. St. L.J. 87, American Hegemony and the Foreign Affairs Constitution, LEXIS

The stability of the

The hegemonic model also reduces the need for executive branch flexibility, and the institutional competence terrain shifts toward the courts.

current U.S.-led international system depends on the ability of the U.S. to govern effectively. Effective
governance depends on, among other things, predictability. n422 G. John Ikenberry analogizes America's hegemonic
position to that of a "giant corporation" seeking foreign investors: "The rule of law and the institutions
of policy making in a democracy are the political equivalent of corporate transparency and [*155]
accountability." n423 Stable interpretation of the law bolsters the stability of the system because other
nations will know that they can rely on those interpretations and that there will be at least some degree
of enforcement by the United States. At the same time, the separation of powers serves the global-governance function by reducing the ability of the executive
branch to make "abrupt or aggressive moves toward other states." n424

Heg solves extinction

Barnett, Professor, Warfare Analysis and Research Dept – U.S. Naval War College, 3/7/’11 (Thomas, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue
Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” )
Let me be more blunt: As
the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force for
peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed
the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there
would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing
equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America
stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced
the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of
empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly
10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts.
 Rule of Law Impacts – Economy

Rule of law increases economic growth

Butkiewicz and Yanikkaya 4 Professor of Economics at the University of Delaware and
Professor of Business at Gebze Institute of Technology
[James L. and Halit, "Institutional Quality and Economic Growth: Maintenance of the Rule of Law or Democratic
Institutions, or Both," February, http://www.lerner.udel.edu/economics/WorkingPapers/2004/UDWP2004-03.pdf]
Evaluation of these two institutional frameworks for their effects on economic growth requires separate assessment of each. Empirical
analysis of the impacts of each institutional type on growth has found that maintenance of the rule of
law enhances growth, while establishing democratic political systems has no significant effect on growth. In this paper, we report
findings suggesting that these conclusions are not robust to sample selection or estimation technique. Specifically, we find evidence
indicating that both maintenance of the rule of law and democratic institutions increase real economic growth. The
evidence also indicates that the effects of democracy are greatest for developing countries, a finding that is especially germane for
development policy in these countries.

Economic collapse causes global nuclear war

Mead 9 (http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=571cbbb9-2887-4d81-8542-92e83915f5f8&p=2)
the current crisis could join the
If current market turmoil seriously damaged the performance and prospects of India and China,
Great Depression in the list of economic events that changed history, even if the recessions in the West are relatively
short and mild. The United States should stand ready to assist Chinese and Indian financial authorities on an emergency basis--and work very
hard to help both countries escape or at least weather any economic downturn. It may test the political will of the Obama administration, but
the United States must avoid a protectionist response to the economic slowdown. U.S. moves to limit market access for Chinese and Indian
For billions of people in nuclear-armed countries to emerge from this
producers could poison relations for years.
crisis believing either that the United States was indifferent to their well-being or that it had profited from their distress could
damage U.S. foreign policy far more severely than any mistake made by George W. Bush. It's not just the great
powers whose trajectories have been affected by the crash. Lesser powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran also face new constraints. The crisis has
strengthened the U.S. position in the Middle East as falling oil prices reduce Iranian influence and increase the dependence of the oil sheikdoms
on U.S. protection. Success in Iraq--however late, however undeserved, however limited--had already improved the Obama administration's
prospects for addressing regional crises. Now, the collapse in oil prices has put the Iranian regime on the defensive. The annual inflation rate
rose above 29 percent last September, up from about 17 percent in 2007, according to Iran's Bank Markazi. Economists forecast that Iran's real
GDP growth will drop markedly in the coming months as stagnating oil revenues and the continued global economic downturn force the
government to rein in its expansionary fiscal policy. All this has weakened Ahmadinejad at home and Iran abroad. Iranian officials must balance
the relative merits of support for allies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria against domestic needs, while international sanctions and other
diplomatic sticks have been made more painful and Western carrots (like trade opportunities) have become more attractive. Meanwhile, Saudi
Arabia and other oil states have become more dependent on the United States for protection against Iran, and they have fewer resources to
fund religious extremism as they use diminished oil revenues to support basic domestic spending and development goals. None of this makes
the Middle East an easy target for U.S. diplomacy, but thanks in part to the economic crisis, the incoming administration has the chance to try
some new ideas and to enter negotiations with Iran (and Syria) from a position of enhanced strength. Every crisis is different, but there seem to
be reasons why, over time, financial crises on balance reinforce rather than undermine the world position of the leading capitalist countries.
Since capitalism first emerged in early modern Europe, the ability to exploit the advantages of rapid economic development has been a key
factor in international competition. Countries that can encourage--or at least allow and sustain--the change, dislocation, upheaval, and pain
that capitalism often involves, while providing their tumultuous market societies with appropriate regulatory and legal frameworks, grow
swiftly. They produce cutting-edge technologies that translate into military and economic power. They are able to invest in education, making
their workforces ever more productive. They typically develop liberal political institutions and cultural norms that value, or at least tolerate,
dissent and that allow people of different political and religious viewpoints to collaborate on a vast social project of modernization--and to
maintain political stability in the face of accelerating social and economic change. The vast productive capacity of leading capitalist powers gives
them the ability to project influence around the world and, to some degree, to remake the world to suit their own interests and preferences.
This is what the United Kingdom and the United States have done in past centuries, and what other capitalist powers like France, Germany, and
Japan have done to a lesser extent. In these countries, the social forces that support the idea of a competitive market economy within an
appropriately liberal legal and political framework are relatively strong. But, in many other countries where capitalism rubs people the wrong
way, this is not the case. On either side of the Atlantic, for example, the Latin world is often drawn to anti-capitalist movements and rulers on
both the right and the left. Russia, too, has never really taken to capitalism and liberal society--whether during the time of the czars, the
commissars, or the post-cold war leaders who so signally failed to build a stable, open system of liberal democratic capitalism even as many
former Warsaw Pact nations were making rapid transitions. Partly as a result of these internal cultural pressures, and partly because, in much of
the world, capitalism has appeared as an unwelcome interloper, imposed by foreign forces and shaped to fit foreign rather than domestic
interests and preferences, many countries are only half-heartedly capitalist. When crisis strikes, they are quick to decide that capitalism is a
failure and look for alternatives. So far, such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work; they have left the societies that have tried
them in a progressively worse position, farther behind the front-runners as time goes by. Argentina has lost ground to Chile; Russian
development has fallen farther behind that of the Baltic states and Central Europe. Frequently, the crisis has weakened the power of the
merchants, industrialists, financiers, and professionals who want to develop a liberal capitalist society integrated into the world. Crisis can also
strengthen the hand of religious extremists, populist radicals, or authoritarian traditionalists who are determined to resist liberal capitalist
society for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, the companies and banks based in these societies are often less established and more vulnerable to
the consequences of a financial crisis than more established firms in wealthier societies. As a result, developing countries and countries where
capitalism has relatively recent and shallow roots tend to suffer greater economic and political damage when crisis strikes--as, inevitably, it
does. And, consequently, financial crises often reinforce rather than challenge the global distribution of power and wealth. This may be
happening yet again. None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually
help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of
life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and
the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of
wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises. Bad
economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful
place in 1928, but the Depression poisoned German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to
power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts might start slouching toward
Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline, but, if we can't
get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.
 Rule of Law Impacts – Economy Ext

Rule of law key to economic growth

The Economist 8 ["Order in the jungle - Economics and the rule of law" 3-15, Lexis]
The rule of law is usually thought of as a political or legal matter. The world's newest country, Kosovo, says its priority is to improve the rule of
law in order to reduce corruption and build up the state. But
in the past ten years the rule of law has become important
in economics too. Indeed, it has become the motherhood and apple pie of development economics—
which makes Mr Rodrik's confession the more striking. The rule of law is held to be not only good in itself, because it
embodies and encourages a just society, but also a cause of other good things, notably growth. "No
other single political ideal has ever achieved global endorsement," says Brian Tamanaha, a legal scholar at St John's
University, New York.

Rule of law key to economic growth

Blue and Gray 8 ["Greenspan: Rule of Law Will Help Revive Economy" 10-6,
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=36858]

“Corporations stand to lose large amounts if judicial independence wavers,” O’Connor said. “And there’s not total
satisfaction with alternative dispute resolution either.” She noted that businesses view the current court situation as a
failure in some respects. Runaway juries, unpredictable outcomes, litigation delay, expense and possible inexpertise have caused
corporations to look outside the court system to settle their disputes, she said. Keynote speaker Greenspan credited the
Constitution with providing the type of long-term economic prosperity that has given Americans the
highest standard of living in the world over the last century. The rule of law – particularly, laws relating to private
ownership – reputation and trust in the word of others are critical to economic growth, he said. “Trust will eventually re-
emerge as investors dip hesitantly back into the marketplace (and) from that point, history tells us, financial and
economic revival sets in,” he said. “It always has, in this society governed by that remarkable document we call the Constitution of the
United States.”
 Rule of Law Impacts – Human Rights

Rule of law is the fundamental human right

McDowell and Presser 4 Professor of Law at Jepson, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution and Bradley Resident Scholar at the Center for Judicial
Studies AND Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern University School of Law and the
Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and Associate Research Fellow at the
University of London
[Gary L. and Stephen B., “At Century's Dawn: The Future and Past of Human rights and the Rule of Law” Spring, 2
Nw. U. J. Int'l Hum. Rts. 1, Lexis]
P5 Professor Tierney also reminds us that it may sometimes be too facile to see an opposition between
the assertion of individual rights and the continuing needs of the community in the maintenance of the
rule of law. He reminds us that among the purposes of jurisprudence, after all, is to secure the rights of
individuals, and that his twelfth century churchmen could have agreed with a modern philosopher, Jacques Maritain, when he wrote that
"there is nothing more illusory than to pose the problem of the person and the common good in terms of opposition." n7 P6 Professor Sir
John Baker, in Human rights and the Rule of law in Renaissance England, further develops this theme of the symbiotic
relationship between the rule of law and human rights by reminding us that the most important "human
right" is the rule of law itself. As do the papers of Professors Glendon and Cassel, Professor Baker reminds us that we have not (and
perhaps never will) arrive at a situation where our governments or our supra-national organizations fully secure "universal human rights,"
especially when we are threatened by "hidden enemies." But Baker nicely asserts that the fact that the security measures that appear to
infringe these "rights," are "controversial nevertheless shows that the old philosophy of the
rule of law is not moribund; indeed,
it still applies in most everyday situations and is regarded as the ideal." n8

Failure to protect human rights makes extinction inevitable

Human Rights Web, 94 (An Introduction to the Human Rights Movement Created on July 20, 1994 /
Last edited on January 25, 1997, http://www.hrweb.org/intro.html)
The United Nations Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN Human Rights convenants were written and implemented in the
aftermath of the Holocaust, revelations coming from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bomb, and other
horrors smaller in magnitude but not in impact on the individuals they affected. A whole lot of people in a number of countries had a crisis of
conscience and found they could no longer look the other way while tyrants jailed, tortured, and killed their neighbors. Many also realized that
advances in technology and changes in social structures had rendered war a threat to the continued existence of the human race. Large
numbers of people in many countries lived under the control of tyrants, having no recourse but war to
relieve often intolerable living conditions. Unless some way was found to relieve the lot of these people,
they could revolt and become the catalyst for another wide-scale and possibly nuclear war. For perhaps the
first time, representatives from the majority of governments in the world came to the conclusion that basic human rights must be
protected, not only for the sake of the individuals and countries involved, but to preserve the human
race.
 Rule of Law Impacts – War

Rule of law is key to peace

Peerenboom 5
[Randall, "HUMAN RIGHTS AND RULE OF LAW: WHAT'S THE RELATIONSHIP?," Georgetown Journal of International
Law, Spring, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4140/is_200504/ai_n15740397/]
Rule of law is said to facilitate geopolitical stability and global peace.14 According to some, it may help
prevent wars from occurring in the first place.15 It also provides guidelines for how war is carried out,
limiting some of the worst atrocities associated with military conflicts. It offers the possibility of holding
accountable those who commit acts of aggression and violate humanitarian laws of war, and it is central
to the establishment of a rights-respecting post-conflict regime.
 Rule of Law Impact – Laundry List
Rule of law prevents war, terrorism, and econ collapse
Feldman ‘8 [Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard
University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “When Judges Make Foreign
Policy”, NEW YORK TIMES, 9—25—08, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28law-t.html]
On each occasion that the Supreme Court has had to confront such drastically changed circumstances, it has adopted the approach of seeing constitutional government as an ongoing
experiment. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that our system of government is an experiment, “as all life is an experiment.” Justice Robert Jackson, confronting the separation of
powers — about which the Constitution is cryptic at best — admitted frankly that nothing in the document, the case law or the scholars’ writings got him any closer to an answer. Then he tried
to come up with his own rules, designed to reflect political reality and the changed nature of the presidency. Looking at today’s problem through the lens of our great constitutional
experiment, it emerges that there is no single, enduring answer to which way the Constitution should be oriented, inward or outward. The truth is that we have had an inward- and outward-
looking Constitution by turns, depending on the needs of the country and of the world. Neither the text of the Constitution, nor the history of its interpretation, nor the deep values embedded
in it justify one answer rather than the other. In the face of such ambiguity, the right question is not simply in what direction does our Constitution look, but where do we need the Constitution

this requires the Supreme Court to think in terms not only of principle but also of policy: to weigh
to look right now? Answering

national and international interests; and to exercise fine judgment about how our Constitution functions and is
perceived at home and abroad. The conservative and liberal approaches to legitimacy and the rule of law need to be supplemented with a healthy dose of real-world
pragmatism. In effect, the fact that the Constitution affects our relations with the world requires the justices to have a foreign policy of their own. On the surface, it seems as if such inevitably
political judgments are not the proper province of the court. If assessments of the state of the world are called for, shouldn’t the court defer to the decisions of the elected president and
Congress? Aren’t judgments about the direction of our country the exclusive preserve of the political branches? Indeed, the Supreme Court does need to be limited to its proper role. But when
it comes to our engagement with the world, that role involves taking a stand, not stepping aside. The reason for this is straightforward: the court is in charge of interpreting the Constitution,
and the Constitution plays a major role in shaping our engagement with the rest of the world. The court therefore has no choice about whether to involve itself in the question of which
direction the Constitution will face; it is now unavoidably involved. Even choosing to defer to the other branches of government amounts to a substantive stand on the question. That said,

when the court exercises its own independent political judgment, it still does so in a distinctively legal
way. For one thing, the court can act only through deciding the cases that happen to come before it, and the court is
limited to using the facts and circumstances of those cases to shape a broader constitutional vision. The court also speaks in the idiom of law — which is to say, of regular rules that apply to
everyone across the board. It cannot declare, for instance, that only this or that detainee has rights. It must hold that the same rights extend to every detainee who is similarly situated. This,

too, is an effective constraint on the way the court exercises its policy judgment. Indeed, it is this very regularity that gives its decisions
legitimacy as the product of judicial logic and reasoning. Why We Need More Law, More Than Ever So what do we need the Constitution to do for us now? The answer, I think, is that
the Constitution must be read to help us remember that while the war on terror continues, we are also still in the midst of a period of rapid globalization. An enduring lesson of the Bush years

In our
is the extreme difficulty and cost of doing things by ourselves. We need to build and rebuild alliances — and law has historically been one of our best tools for doing so.

present precarious situation, it would be a terrible mistake to abandon our historic position of
leadership in the global spread of the rule of law. Our leadership matters for reasons both universal and national. Seen from the perspective of the
world, the fragmentation of power after the cold war creates new dangers of disorder that need to be mitigated by

the sense of regularity and predictability that only the rule of law can provide. Terrorists need to be deterred. Failed

states need to be brought under the umbrella of international organizations so they can govern themselves. And economic
interdependence demands coordination, so that the collapse of one does not become the collapse of all.
From a national perspective, our interest is less in the inherent value of advancing individual rights than in claiming that our allies are obligated to help us by virtue of legal commitments they
have made. The Bush administration’s lawyers often insisted that law was a tool of the weak, and that therefore as a strong nation we had no need to engage it. But this notion of “lawfare” as
a threat to the United States is based on a misunderstanding of the very essence of how law operates. Law comes into being and is sustained not because the weak demand it but because it is
a tool of the powerful — as it has been for the United States since World War II at least. The reason those with power prefer law to brute force is that it regularizes and legitimates the exercise
of authority. It is easier and cheaper to get the compliance of weaker people or states by promising them rules and a fair hearing than by threatening them constantly with force. After all, if
those wielding power really objected to the rule of law, they could abolish it, the way dictators and juntas have often done the world over.
 Rule of Law Impact - Extinction
Rule of law checks extinction
Charles S. Rhyne 5/1/1958 Law Day Speech for Voice of America delivered on the first Law Day
http://www.abanet.org/publiced/lawday/rhyne58.html

The tremendous yearning of all peoples for peace can only be answered by the use of law to replace weapons in resolving international
disputes. We in our country sincerely believe that mankind’s best hope for preventing the tragic consequences of nuclear-
satellite-missile warfare is to persuade the nations of the entire world to submit all disputes to tribunals of justice for all adjudication
under the rule of law. We lawyers of America would like to join lawyers from every nation in the world in fashioning an international
code of law so appealing that sentiment will compel its general acceptance. Man’s relation to man is the most neglected field of study,
exploration and development in the world community. It is also the most critical. The most important basic fact of our generation is that the
rapid advance of knowledge in science and technology has forced increased international relationships in a shrunken and indivisible world.
Men must either live together in peace or in modern war we will surely die together. History teaches that the rule of law has
enabled mankind to live together peacefully within nations and it is clear that this same rule of law
offers our best hope as a mechanism to achieve and maintain peace between nations. The lawyer is the
technician in man’s relationship to man. There exists a worldwide challenge to our profession to develop law to replace weapons before
the dreadful holocaust of nuclear war overtake our people. It is said that an idea can be more powerful than an atom
because strength today resides in man’s mind—not his muscle. We lawyers of the world must take the idea of peace under the rule of law
and make it a force superior to weapons and thus outlaw wars of weapons. Law offers the best hope for order in a disordered world. The law
of force or the force of law will rule the world. In the field of human conduct the law has never confessed failure. The struggle for a world
ruled by law must go on with increased intensity. We must prove that the genius of man in the field of science and technology has not so far
outstripped his inventiveness in the sphere of human relations as to make catastrophe inevitable. If man can conquer space he can also solve
the need for legal machinery to insure universal and lasting peace. In our country ignorance of the
value of law in international
relations and what it could do for the people of the world is appalling. A major purpose of “Law Day-U.S.A.” is therefore to demonstrate to
our people that the need for law in the world community is the greatest gap in the growing structure of civilization. And we
lawyers of America are anxious to work with lawyers and men of good of all nations in filling this gap in that structure. We believe that no
greater challenge exists for any profession and that no greater service to mankind can be performed.

*This evidence uses gender-biased language

SOP Impact
Declining legitimacy wrecks separation of powers
Michael J. Nelson [Penn State U] Alicia Uribe-McGuire [U Illinois] May-24-2017 Political Research
Quarterly 10.1177/1065912917709353 Opportunity and Overrides: The Effect of Institutional Public
Support on Congressional Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1065912917709353#articleCitationDownloadContainer
To return to the empirical observation that began the paper, what might the longer-term consequences of the court’s lower than typical levels
of public support have on its policies? Our results suggest that, should
the court’s support continue to decline, Congress
will feel freer to override the court’s decisions, therefore, undermining the stability of the law. Moreover,
should the court’s support continue to decline, an emboldened Congress would be able to disempower
the court in the latter’s attempts to be a coequal partner in governance: when Congress is willing and able to override the court with
impunity, the court’s ability to be an effective check on congressional and presidential power begins to waver. In a time where many are
looking to the court to fulfill this constitutional role, our findings suggest that the court’s low public support render it unable to be the knight in
shining armor wished for by many.

Separation of Powers protects from tyranny

Samuels and Eaton 2002 David, University of Minnesota, Kent, Princeton University, “Presidentialism And,
Or, and Versus Parliamentarism: The State of the Literature and an Agenda for Future Research Conference on
Consequences of Political Institutions in Democracy”, Duke University, 4/5

The authors of the US constitution feared tyranny of the majority. They aimed to create a stable
government, but one that did not move quickly to either enact or to change policy, so as to protect
minority rights. They concluded that the best way to do so was to set “ambition against ambition” within a
system of majority rule, by separating executive and legislative origin and survival. This basic constitutional
structure has been the model for all subsequent presidential systems. The Madisonian conception of the separation of powers holds
that tyranny is relatively less likely given the separation of survival because it places the executive and
legislative branches in formally different institutional environments. This generates different behavioral incentives,
making majority steamrolls at a minimum more difficult to coordinate. Even when there is substantial preference overlap between branches,
separation of survival thus provides a safeguard against tyranny. In modern political science parlance, the structure of
presidentialism is designed to be less decisive and more resolute (Cox and McCubbins 2001). That is, we expect policy change to be slower and
less dramatic under presidentialism.
 Terrorism Impact
Supreme Court legitimacy on law is key to global leadership and solving terrorism
Daniel J. Frank* BIO: *J.D. Candidate, The University of Iowa Iowa Law Review March, 2007 92 Iowa L.
Rev. 1037
C. Potential Dangers of an Insular Posture Conservative politicians echo the sentiments of originalist Court members, weary of the Court's "dangerous" trend of
citing foreign law in domestic constitutional matters 238 reintroduced in Lawrence and Roper. For years, the Court largely decided not to participate in an ongoing
judicial dialogue in which foreign law was seriously considered, even if the law was not binding. 239 Perhaps
the real danger, though, stems
from this insular posture and nonparticipation, which tend to perpetuate an unfavorable view of the United States
(particularly of the U.S. judiciary) by the outside world. 240 The originalists' refusal to look outward when dealing with basic civil liberties,
"labeling them as idiosyncratic American values," effectively "declares the world irrelevant to our Constitution." 241 This traditional unwillingness to engage in
transnational judicial dialogue on a meaningful level has already had an impact: "the U.S. Supreme Court is no longer viewed worldwide as a beacon or trailblazer on
civil and individual rights." 242 In the wake of September 11th, as President George W. Bush attempts to lead a worldwide coalition against
terror, American judicial passivity feeds the outward perception that the United States "pays only lip service to the
opinions of mankind." 243 Originalist opposition to considering foreign law when interpreting the Constitution may, in turn, invite undue friction

and ultimately strain U.S. foreign relations at a time when America seeks the [*1069] military, political, and
economic cooperation of other countries. 244 Although the U.S. Supreme Court is empowered to settle cases and controversies 245 and not
to mollify cross-border tensions, the scope of today's problems oftentimes demands that Justices understand and acknowledge foreign law. 246 According to Justice
Ginsburg, "We are the losers if we neglect what others can tell us about endeavors to eradicate bias against women, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups."
247 Lawrence and Roper signaled to the world once again that the
American judiciary values opinions of other nations and
considers foreign law in constitutional matters, thereby acknowledging the world community without compromising domestic legal
norms. 248 If such a course continues, a ripple effect may then ensue: as America's image abroad improves, the spirit of

cooperation between countries increases, and the United States can serve as a more effective global leader. Admitting that
certain outmoded practices - state interference with private sexual conduct and the juvenile death penalty, for example - are similarly condemned abroad has
helped steer the Court on the path to reclaiming its image abroad while maintaining the primacy of American domestic law.

Terrorism causes extinction

Pry 15 (Peter Vincent, PhD, Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security
and Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum,
http://www.emptaskforcenhs.com/uncategorized/terrorism-an-existential-threat/, “TERRORISM–AN
EXISTENTIAL THREAT”,

Terrorists do not need a nuclear missile to pose an existential threat to the United States, however. Technology has so
evolved since World War II and the Cold War that the U.S. and the West have become an electronic civilization. Our prosperity and very lives

depend upon a complex web of high-tech information, communications, financial, transportation, and
industrial critical infrastructures, all supported by the keystone critical infrastructure–the electric power grid. Admiral Michael Rogers,
Director of the National Security Agency and U.S. CYBERCOMMAND, in November 2014, warned that China and other actors could make a cyber attack that

would blackout the U.S. national electric grid for 18 months, with catastrophic consequences for society. The Congressional EMP Commission
warned that a nationwide blackout outage lasting one year could kill up to 9 of 10 Americans from starvation and societal collapse. Terrorists and hostile nations are
probing U.S. cyber defenses every day and are working hard to develop the cyber equivalent of a nuclear warhead. Terrorists can also pose an existential threat to
the United States by attacking its technological Achilles’ Heel the old fashioned way, using bullets and bombs. A study by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, the government agency responsible for grid security, warns that a terror attack that destroys just nine (9) key transformer substations, out of 2,000,
could blackout unpower the entire nation for over a year. Terrorists have learned that the electric grid is a major societal vulnerability. Terrorist attacks have already
caused large-scale blackouts outage of 420,000 people in Mexico (October 2013), the entire nation of Yemen (by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in June 2014),
and 80 percent of the grid in Pakistan (January 2015)–this last a nuclear weapons state. And if
terrorists steal a nuclear weapon from Pakistan,
buy one from North Korea, or are given one by Iran, they could loft the warhead by balloon or missile to high-altitude over the U.S. to make the

ultimate cyber attack–a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP). EMP could blackout the national electric grid and other life sustaining
critical infrastructures, perhaps permanently
***AFF***
AT: UNQ
 Gorsuch Crushes Legitimacy

Gorsuch nomination crushed legitimacy, the DA is not unique

Feingold, 16 year member of the Senior Judiciary Committee, 2017 (Russ, The Guardian, “If Gorsuch
is confirmed, the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court won’t recover,” 03/20/2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/judge-gorsuch-confirmation-legitimacy-
us-supreme-court, accessed 07/08/2017, JME).

On Monday, when Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing is scheduled to begin,

the Republicans will attempt to complete their
cynical political takeover of the US supreme court, launched last year when they failed to confirm or to
even give a hearing to Judge Merrick Garland.

Never before has Senate leadership so openly and intentionally played political games with our highest
court. Already, the legitimacy of the supreme court has taken a severe blow because of it. But, if Gorsuch is
confirmed, it would lock in a dangerous precedent from which the legitimacy of our highest court might
never recover.
 Legitimacy is low
Legit low now
Michael J. Nelson [Penn State U] Alicia Uribe-McGuire [U Illinois] May-24-2017 Political Research
Quarterly 10.1177/1065912917709353 Opportunity and Overrides: The Effect of Institutional Public
Support on Congressional Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1065912917709353#articleCitationDownloadContainer

Public and scholarly interest in the public’s support for the US Supreme Court has blossomed in recent years. Journalistic
accounts of
the court’s support have suggested that the court’s support at the beginning of this decade reached perilously
low levels (e.g., Pew Research Center 2013). Gallup reported in 2014 that only 30 percent of Americans had a “great deal”
or “quite a lot” of confidence in the institution (Riffkin 2014). This low level of public confidence marked a historic
low for the judiciary (McCarthy 2014).
AT: LINK
 Link Turn
Link turn—moral decisions increase court legitimacy
Bonneau et. al., Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, 2017
(Chris W., Jarod T. Kelly, Department of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh, Kira Pronin, Student
of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Shane M. Redman, Department of Political Science at
University of Pittsburgh, Matthew Jarit, Department of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh,
“Evaluating the Effects of Multiple Opinion Rationales on Supreme Court Legitimacy,” American Politics
Research, Volume 45, Issue 3, 2017, ebscohost, ATH)

As a whole, these results provide consistent empirical evidence that extralegal

reasons do nothing to harm the legitimacy
of the Court, contrary to H1. Institutional support, confidence, and perceived ideology of the Court remain
unaffected when moral and public opinion reasons are provided in addition to standard legal arguments.
This is true even among those who disagree with the decision. In fact, it appears that moral arguments could
possibly even increase the legitimacy of the Court. This stands in clear contrast to previous work that finds extralegal reasons
decrease the legitimacy of the Court (e.g., Farganis, 2012). We find that when these reasons are provided in addition to more commonplace
legal arguments, there are no observable effects. However, we do show that agreement with the outcome of the case is a consequential
predictor of legitimacy, consistent with H3. When individuals disagree with the outcome, regardless of the reason justifying the decision, they
perceive the Court as less legitimate. When they agree with the outcome, however, they view the Court as a highly legitimate institution. While
we cannot speculate with these data as to how long-lasting this effect is, it does suggest that the Court may lose legitimacy if it makes a highly
unpopular decision (or, more plausibly, a series of unpopular decisions)

Decisions increase legitimacy.

Anke Grosskopf (University of Pittsburgh) and Jeffery J. Mondak (Florida State University)
September, 1998 Do Attitudes toward Specific Supreme Court Decisions Matter? The Impact of
Webster and Texas v. Johnson on Public Confidence in the Supreme Court Political Research Quarterly,
Vol. 51, No. 3. pp. 633-654.
The Supreme Court's legitimating function has been demonstrated in several experimental and quasi-experimental studies (Hoekstra 1995;
Hoekstra and Segal 1996; Mondak 1990, 1992, 1994). This body of research, which draws heavily on social-psychological theories of
information processing, establishes that the
Supreme Court can in at least some circumstances elevate public support for a
policy simply by issuing a decision. However, this effect does not operate uniformly for all decisions or for all people. Instead,
knowledge that the Supreme Court has ruled a particular way increases the perceived legitimacy of a
policy the most for those people for whom the issue is of the lowest salience or personal relevance.
 Legitimacy Resilient
Supreme Court legitimacy is resilient – one bad ruling won’t tank
Bonneau et. al., Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, 2017
(Chris W., Jarod T. Kelly, Department of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh, Kira Pronin, Student
of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Shane M. Redman, Department of Political Science at
University of Pittsburgh, Matthew Jarit, Department of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh,
“Evaluating the Effects of Multiple Opinion Rationales on Supreme Court Legitimacy,” American Politics
Research, Volume 45, Issue 3, 2017, ebscohost, ATH)

In this article, we
examined whether a key component of judicial opinions (the sources used by the justices) could
have an adverse effect on perceptions of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. Our results from two experiments in
which we manipulate the sources used by the Court in an opinion indicate that attitudes toward the Court are stable. This further confirms the
findings that legitimacy
is very difficult to undermine (e.g., Caldeira & Gibson, 1992). From a normative perspective, this is
good news for those concerned that the Court might be doing itself harm by relying on public opinion or
moral justifications for its legal decisions. Our results indicate that using these sources is harmless from a legitimacy perspective.
That said, it is important to note that our study is unable to observe longitudinal effects. It is possible that continued reliance on extralegal
sources could diminish institutional legitimacy over the long run. However, we think this is unlikely; reliance on extralegal factors is not a new
phenomenon. Moreover, as both our results and the results from Gibson’s (2012) survey of Kentuckians indicate, a nontrivial number of people
expect (and are fully comfortable with) courts not to rely solely on legal factors in decision making. Just as importantly, we find that individuals
are more likely to view the Court as legitimate if the Court makes decisions individuals agree with (consistent with Bartels & Johnston, 2013),
and this does not vary with the reasons provided in the opinion. Thus, mentioning moral reasons or public opinion does not reduce legitimacy
in the eyes of people who disagree with the Court’s decision. Interestingly, relying on precedent does reduce legitimacy, suggesting that
individuals who disagree with the Court think it should correct past erroneous decisions. There may indeed be factors that will cause individuals
to question or rethink their perceptions of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, but the reasoning offered by the Court in their judicial opinions
is not generally one of them.

Legitimacy is durable
Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

Our analysis reveals a remarkable stability in public support for the Court. Through a period in time in which the
Court issued high profile and highly salient rulings on issues as diverse as the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, to the
federal constitution’s guarantee of marriage to same-sex couples, to the ability of colleges to use race as a criteria in admissions, to the
constitutionality of President Obama’s immigration plan, support
for the Court was unwavering. Moreover, those changes that
did occur were minor and predicted by a single factor: a respondent’s ideology. The
results should allay fears that a decline in
support has weakened the efficacy of the judiciary and instead suggests that the Court’s support may be
even more robust than even the most optimistic previous accounts had suggested.

Legitimacy deficits are self correcting

Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
As a result, we simply do not know the extent to which any dips or gains in the Court’s support among individuals survive
the passage of more than a handful of months. Given that the Court clusters its most important decisions during the month of
June (Epstein, Landes and Posner 2015), it may be the case that what appear to be meaningful changes in the Court’s support
revert to an equilibrium level of support by the time the Court’s next term begins (or, under a more generous
theory, until the Court decides important cases again the following June). Indeed, were this the case, support for the Court would appear to
change in short-term panel surveys or in experimental settings but would actually be relatively stable over time. Because the Court decides
most of its important cases in June of each year, panel surveys that encompass only a single year are unable to assess the sort of change that
existing theory predicts will erode diffuse support: a number of displeasing decisions, made over a period of time (Easton 1965; Gibson and
Caldeira 1992). Indeed, in their pioneering study of the stability of public opinion toward the Court, Mondak and Smithey (1997) suggest that,
for even important cases, the
window of opportunity for a decision to affect public support for the court is
about one month. At that point, support reverts back to its equilibrium level. Short panels, therefore, can help us
understand whether support for the Court shifts in response to a displeasing decision (or set of decisions), but they are unable to examine the
persistence of these effects. And it is persistence that is important: if
support for the Court tends to revert back to an equilibrium
level, as Mondak and Smithey (1997) suggest, then the Court is free to make decisions that anger the American
people with relatively impunity. The existence of persistent change in support, however, would suggest that the Court’s legitimacy
is more malleable than existing theory suggests; the normative implications of either finding are both obvious and important.
 Single decisions not key
Ind decisions not key
Grosskopf, 1998
https://business.highbeam.com/137812/article-1G1-21186966/do-attitudes-toward-specific-supreme-
court-decisions Anke Grosskopf, PhD in political science; specializing in international politics, Do
Attitudes toward Specific Supreme Court Decisions Matter? The Impact of Webster and Texas v. Johnson
on Public Confidence in the Supreme Court, 1998, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3, p. 4
Some evidence supports our political capital perspective, but the empirical record remains unsatisfying. Tanenhaus and Murphy (1981) found
that approval of Supreme Court rulings accounted for roughly 15 percent of the little variance in diffuse
support they detected. However, due to the nine-year gap between the waves of their panel survey, the authors could not
attribute change in support to any specific court rulings. Caldeira (1986) showed that aggregate confidence in the Court
varies in response to judicial actions such as support for defendants' rights, but Caldeira also could not trace this effect to specific decisions.
Caldeira subsequently (1987) demonstrated that public response to Supreme Court decisions affected aggregate support for Franklin
Roosevelt's court-packing plan. However, because the dependent variable was not support for the Court, these results speak only indirectly to
the political capital thesis. Unlike survey-based research, laboratory experiments (Mondak 1991, 1992) provide direct support for the claim that
attitudes toward decisions affect assessments of the Court. Unfortunately, the generalizability of such findings is uncertain due to the use of
hypothetical scenarios, specialized research contexts, and nonrepresentative (i.e., college student) samples.

Unpopular decisions not sufficient to disrupt legitimacy

Michael J. Nelson February 24, 2016 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science The
Pennsylvania State University James L. Gibson Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government
Department of Political Science Washington University in St. Louis

http://mjnelson.org/papers/RoutledgeChapter.pdf U.S. Supreme Court Legitimacy: Unanswered

Questions and an Agenda for Future Research
Among research that uses valid and reliable measures of diffuse support, the relationship has been relatively clear. Gibson and Caldeira (1992)
demonstrated that the
relationship between diffuse and specific support for the United States Supreme Court
is a relatively weak one, and Gibson, Caldeira, and Baird (1998) reported that, for the 20 countries in their analysis, the average
relationship between diffuse support and specific support for high courts worldwide is .33 (352, Table 7).13 The relationship has also held at the
aggregate level, where study
after study has shown that the U.S. Supreme Court’s legitimacy has stayed at a
relatively high level for years despite volatility in aggregate-level specific support for the Court (e.g., Gibson
2007). Such stability, especially in the face of controversial decisions like Bush v. Gore, has lent strong
credence to the view that the Court’s legitimacy will remain undisturbed even as it decides cases in ways
that displease a majority of Americans (Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence 2003b; Kritzer 2001; Nicholson and Howard 2003; Yates and
Whitford 2002; Price and Romantan 2004). In short, the conventional wisdom has received widespread support at both the aggregate and
individual levels of analysis.
 No Internal Link
No internal link between specific support of decisions and general legitimacy
Michael J. Nelson February 24, 2016 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science The
Pennsylvania State University James L. Gibson Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government Department
of Political Science Washington University in St. Louis

http://mjnelson.org/papers/RoutledgeChapter.pdf U.S. Supreme Court Legitimacy: Unanswered

Questions and an Agenda for Future Research

Legitimacy (diffuse support) differs from a second type of institutional support: specific support.
Whereas diffuse support might be conceptualized as a “reservoir of goodwill” that institutions can draw
upon to achieve implementation of disagreeable decisions (Caldeira and Gibson 1992, 658), specific
support is “satisfaction with the performance of a political institution” (Gibson and Caldeira 1992, 1126).
In other words, institutional legitimacy represents longer-term, global judgments about an institution’s
authority whereas specific support represents shorter-term and more fleeting opinions about particular
actions made by an institution. While diffuse support might be thought of as a form of institutional
loyalty, specific support reflects approval or disapproval of recent institutional actions. Thus, a crucial
attribute of courts is the degree to which they enjoy the loyalty, not just approval, of their
constituents.3

Opinion divisions swamp the internal link

Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

However, as Christenson and Glick (2015) demonstrate, support for the Court moves in both directions—positive and
negative—after the public learns about important judicial decisions. This can lead to aggregate stability,
particularly when the American people are divided over what a “good” outcome in a particular case is.
Indeed, Gibson and Nelson (2015) have suggested that, because the American people are divided fairly equally on many
issues, even a strong relationship between performance satisfaction and diffuse support is not a grave
threat to the Court’s legitimacy because the number of individuals who are pleased with the decision and the
number of individuals who are disappointed in the decision are approximately equal in number, thereby canceling each other out
in the aggregate.
No internal link - dissipation
Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

That we find remarkable stability in the Court’s legitimacy is particularly surprising given that our waves dramatically
oversample the month of July meaning that respondents were completing the survey just weeks (or, in some cases, even just days) after the
Court had decided some of the most high profile issues in American life. Yet, despite this design, there is no evidence of volatility in the Court’s
support. Indeed, these results provide some context for findings like those reported by Christenson and Glick (2015): support may
appear to shift in the immediate aftermath of a decision or in a fictionalized survey experiment. However, these
changes are not persistent, and support returns to its equilibrium level in short order. As a result, these results
underscore the vital role that panel data must play as scholars seek to understand the dynamics of institutional support. Legitimacy is an
important concept precisely because if its durability; an overemphasis on short-term dynamics of support over the
persistence of these effects renders scholars unable to determine whether what appear to be changes in the Court’s support have meaningful
consequences. If the effects of a decision or a lab experiment quickly dissipate–as these findings suggest–then the substantive
importance of these findings is called into question.

No Internal Link – attention span

Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania
State University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science
Washington University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of
the U.S. Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

The public’s short attention span provides another, more psychological, reason for temporal stability. Mondak and Smithey
(1997) write that “The window of opportunity for a decision to affect institutional support stays open only so
long as the ruling remains salient in other words, not long at all for most cases.” (1122). After a controversial case is decided,
media coverage and public awareness of a decision decline quickly (Franklin and Kosaki 1995). As a result few cases
have the staying power to affect support for the Court because the public forgets about them, thus denying the
displeasing decision the ability to affect one’s support for the Court.3
 Impact D
The Court can protect rights even if it loses legitimacy
Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
And indeed, there is some evidence of a subjective ideological disagreement effect, albeit a relatively minor one, in terms of the drift in
the Court’s support. To
the extent that there is any volatility in the Court’s support, it is predicted only by a
respondent’s ideology. While it might initially seem surprising that conservatives were punishing the Roberts Court—one oft cited
for its conservatism–a brief glance at Table 1 provides an explanation (and, by extension, support for the theory espoused by Bartels and
Johnston (2013)): while the Court’s decisions might overall be slightly conservative over this time period, many of the salient decisions
known to respondents (e.g. same-sex marriage, the Affordable Care Act, and affirmative action) were all decided in ways favored by
liberals. Indeed, Pew reported in 2015 that 68% of conservative Republicans viewed the Roberts Court as liberal (Pew Research Center
2015). These findings thus underscore the importance of studying subjective rather than objective perceptions of policymaking. The
normative implication of these results is both clear and comforting. Because
the Court’s support is so stable, it should be
able to fulfill its constitutional role as the protector of individual rights and liberties and as a check on
the institutional powers of Congress and the executive even when those decisions are unpopular. In a
day and age where many fear the breakdown of institutional norms and powers, our results suggest that
the American constitutional scheme may be more robust than many currently fear.
 1AR
Non UQ, Legitimacy is low now that’s Feingold ’17 because of Gorsuh’s controversial ruling, also

L/T Moral decisions ruled by the supreme court boosts the legitimacy of the courts, specifically the fact
that we are shielding asylees from domestic and gang violence is viewed as ethically good. Example:
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage the Court’s legitimacy surged.

On their Fowler and Jeon 8, Sessions overruled a precedent in 2014, which either means their Impacts
are Non UQ or L/T We are reversing Session’s overruling and so returning it to the regular precedent,
which means we increase court legitimacy.