The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice

The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice PDF Author: Paul R. Dimond
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Views Supreme Court decisions as just part of the evolutionary process of constitutional interpretation.

The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice

The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice PDF Author: Paul R. Dimond
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Views Supreme Court decisions as just part of the evolutionary process of constitutional interpretation.

God Save this Honorable Court

God Save this Honorable Court PDF Author: Laurence H. Tribe
Publisher: Berkley
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Assesses the impact of the Supreme Court on our daily lives, looks at the results of previous appointments to the Court, and describes the Supreme Court's constitutional role.

Strategic Selection

Strategic Selection PDF Author: Christine L. Nemacheck
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813927435
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The process by which presidents decide whom to nominate to fill Supreme Court vacancies is obviously of far-ranging importance, particularly because the vast majority of nominees are eventually confirmed. But why is one individual selected from among a pool of presumably qualified candidates? In Strategic Selection: Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, Christine Nemacheck makes heavy use of presidential papers to reconstruct the politics of nominee selection from Herbert Hoover's appointment of Charles Evan Hughes in 1930 through President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito in 2005. Bringing to light firsthand evidence of selection politics and of the influence of political actors, such as members of Congress and presidential advisors, from the initial stages of formulating a short list through the president's final selection of a nominee, Nemacheck constructs a theoretical framework that allows her to assess the factors impacting a president's selection process. Much work on Supreme Court nominations focuses on struggles over confirmation, or is heavily based on anecdotal material and posits the "idiosyncratic" nature of the selection process; in contrast, Strategic Selection points to systematic patterns in judicial selection. Nemacheck argues that although presidents try to maximize their ideological preferences and minimize uncertainty about nominees' conduct once they are confirmed, institutional factors that change over time, such as divided government and the institutionalism of the presidency, shape and constrain their choices. By revealing the pattern of strategic action, which she argues is visible from the earliest stages of the selection process, Nemacheck takes us a long way toward understanding this critically important part of our political system.

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court PDF Author: Thomas H. Hammond
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751469
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book presents the first comprehensive model of policymaking by strategically-rational justices who pursue their own policy preferences in the Supreme Court's multi-stage decision-making process.

Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making

Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making PDF Author: Paul M. Collins, Jr.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707227
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The U.S. Supreme Court is a public policy battleground in which organized interests attempt to etch their economic, legal, and political preferences into law through the filing of amicus curiae ("friend of the court") briefs. In Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making, Paul M. Collins, Jr. explores how organized interests influence the justices' decision making, including how the justices vote and whether they choose to author concurrences and dissents. Collins presents theories of judicial choice derived from disciplines as diverse as law, marketing, political science, and social psychology. This theoretically rich and empirically rigorous treatment of decision-making on the nation's highest court, which represents the most comprehensive examination ever undertaken of the influence of U.S. Supreme Court amicus briefs, provides clear evidence that interest groups play a significant role in shaping the justices' choices.

Supreme Court Decision-Making

Supreme Court Decision-Making PDF Author: Cornell W. Clayton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226109550
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
What influences decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court? For decades social scientists focused on the ideology of individual justices. Supreme Court Decision Making moves beyond this focus by exploring how justices are influenced by the distinctive features of courts as institutions and their place in the political system. Drawing on interpretive-historical institutionalism as well as rational choice theory, a group of leading scholars consider such factors as the influence of jurisprudence, the unique characteristics of supreme courts, the dynamics of coalition building, and the effects of social movements. The volume's distinguished contributors and broad range make it essential reading for those interested either in the Supreme Court or the nature of institutional politics. Original essays contributed by Lawrence Baum, Paul Brace, Elizabeth Bussiere, Cornell Clayton, Sue Davis, Charles Epp, Lee Epstein, Howard Gillman, Melinda Gann Hall, Ronald Kahn, Jack Knight, Forrest Maltzman, David O'Brien, Jeffrey Segal, Charles Sheldon, James Spriggs II, and Paul Wahlbeck.

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited PDF Author: Jeffrey A. Segal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139936492
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This book, authored by two leading scholars of the Supreme Court and its policy making, systematically presents and validates the use of the attitudinal model to explain and predict Supreme Court decision making. In the process, it critiques the two major alternative models of Supreme Court decision making and their major variants: the legal and rational choice. Using the US Supreme Court Data Base, the justices' private papers, and other sources of information, the book analyzes the appointment process, certiorari, the decision on the merits, opinion assignments, and the formation of opinion coalitions. The book will be the definitive presentation of the attitudinal model as well as an authoritative critique of the legal and rational choice models. The book thoroughly reflects research done since the 1993 publication of its predecessor, as well as decisions and developments in the Supreme Court, including the momentous decision of Bush v. Gore.

Supreme Court Decision-Making

Supreme Court Decision-Making PDF Author: Cornell W. Clayton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226109541
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
What influences decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court? For decades social scientists focused on the ideology of individual justices. Supreme Court Decision Making moves beyond this focus by exploring how justices are influenced by the distinctive features of courts as institutions and their place in the political system. Drawing on interpretive-historical institutionalism as well as rational choice theory, a group of leading scholars consider such factors as the influence of jurisprudence, the unique characteristics of supreme courts, the dynamics of coalition building, and the effects of social movements. The volume's distinguished contributors and broad range make it essential reading for those interested either in the Supreme Court or the nature of institutional politics. Original essays contributed by Lawrence Baum, Paul Brace, Elizabeth Bussiere, Cornell Clayton, Sue Davis, Charles Epp, Lee Epstein, Howard Gillman, Melinda Gann Hall, Ronald Kahn, Jack Knight, Forrest Maltzman, David O'Brien, Jeffrey Segal, Charles Sheldon, James Spriggs II, and Paul Wahlbeck.

The Behavior of Federal Judges

The Behavior of Federal Judges PDF Author: Lee Epstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070682
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

Constitutional Process

Constitutional Process PDF Author: Maxwell L. Stearns
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472088683
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive analysis of how the collective nature of Supreme Court decision making affects the transformation of the justices' preferences into constitutional doctrine. Analyzing the Supreme Court from the perspective of social choice theory, Maxwell L. Stearns offers new insights into Supreme Court decision making that have profound implications for understanding the outcomes in a number of cases and the resulting doctrinal development within constitutional law which traditional analyses have proven ill-equipped to explain. The book models several important process-based Supreme Court rules, including outcome voting, the narrowest-grounds rule, stare decisis, and justiciability, with a particular emphasis on standing. These doctrines have each had a significant impact upon the evolution of modern constitutional law, including but not limited to the following areas: affirmative action, school desegregation, racial gerrymandering, obscenity, and abortion. Each model is presented in nontechnical language with several concrete illustrations drawn from recent Supreme Court case law. The book offers a new understanding of two apparently paradoxical situations: first, cases in which there are separate majorities on specific issues in the case that suggest, logically, that there should be a majority for the dissenting result; and second, cases in which discrete minorities--as opposed to the apparent majority--control the identification and resolution of dispositive case issues. In addition, the book sheds new light on why the Court employs stare decisis, even though the doctrine grounds the evolution of legal doctrine on the order in which cases are presented and decided, and on how the modern standing doctrine ameliorates the incentives for interest groups to time the litigation of cases in a way that will exert a disproportionate influence over the direction of constitutional doctrine. This book will appeal to scholars of the Supreme Court or judicial decision-making. It should also be of interest to students of social choice and of law and economics who have not previously considered the Supreme Court or constitutional law as fertile ground for their disciplines. Maxwell L. Stearns is Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law.