Grisham's "The Pelican Brief" involves a plot to assassinate Supreme Court justices. Why hasn't this been done, or notably tried? It seems like an effective way to significantly affect American policy, much more than, say, assassinating a president, who will simply be replaced by the vice-president who likely shares the same policy views.
In the universe of The Pelican Brief, the antagonist could have done a much better job throwing investigators off the trail by assassinating two justices of the same political ideology, perhaps the ideology opposite to that of the president, making them seem obviously like political assassinations to shift the bench in the president's favor.
In the real world, perhaps "activist" justices "legislating from the bench" are a relatively new phenomenon (Brown vs Board of Education), and the number of assassinations since then is not statistically different from the number of presidential assassinations.
Optimistically under the theory of federalism, matters decided by the national government should rarely affect people personally enough to inspire an assassination: there are other government officials whose actions more personally affect one's life, e.g., state and local government. But for those, one can also just move to a different locality.
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