Chief justices in American state courts of last resort have been more diverse than their federal counterparts. Unlike the federal chief justices, women make up a significant proportion of state chief justice seats in the modern era. Meanwhile, representation for racial minorities has grown less rapidly but still exists. In this research, we examine state chief justice selection to determine whether certain institutional rules facilitate more diverse leadership. We also examine the impact of politics and other contemporaneous factors. Our analysis includes all chief justice selection events in the states from 1970 to 2020. We find that government appointment selection methods help further racial diversity among state court leaders but discover little evidence that such methods affect gender diversity. However, court size, mandatory retirement laws, and bench diversity are all associated with a greater likelihood of a woman or person of color serving as chief justice.

Through a close reading of a 2018 Ontario Superior Court case—Restoule v. Canada—I demonstrate the persistence of the transactional interpretation of treaties, where treaty is understood as a contract of self-dispossession. I argue further that this can be explained through Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism. Commodity fetishism provides the social traction for the transactional interpretation of treaties generally, while capital fetishism explains the subordination of the relational interpretation of treaties in Restoule specifically. Bringing Marx’s theory of fetishism into dialogue with Indigenous treaty visions underscores the importance of attending to and ultimately transforming capitalist social relations to realize treaty while facilitating an appreciation for the way in which Indigenous treaty visions represent an instance of de-fetishizing critique.

Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change.

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