Political influence is a significant threat to judicial impartiality. Members
of the executive or legislative branches frequently undertake to influence
judges in the outcome of specific cases, directly threatening the ability of
judges to render impartial judgment. Examples of external political threats to
judicial impartiality are legion. King James's firing of Chief Justice Coke in
early seventeenth-century England, 125 the effort by President Franklin
Roosevelt to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s, 126 and the recent effort on
the part of federal legislators to threaten judges who cite foreign law in their
opinions with impeachment 127 all reveal that the threats to judicial impartiality
are ubiquitous. Judicial independence is regarded as a structural mechanism to insulate judges from external influence. And the influence that is most
worrisome is the kind of influence that would encourage a judge to decide an
issue on the basis of non-objective criteria-in short, to rule on the basis of
''men," not "law.