Browsing by Subject "Supreme Court"
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Item Open Access A Data-Intensive Framework for Analyzing Dynamic Supreme Court Behavior(2012) Calloway, Timothy JosephMany law professors and scholars think of the Supreme Court as a black box--issues and arguments go in to the Court, and decisions come out. The almost mystical nature that these researchers impute to the Court seems to be a function of the lack of hard data and statistics about the Court's decisions. Without a robust dataset from which to draw proper conclusions, legal scholars are often left only with intuition and conjecture.
Explaining the inner workings of one of the most important institutions in the United States using such a subjective approach is obviously flawed. And, indeed, data is available that can provide researchers with a better understanding of the Court's actions, but scholars have been slow in adopting a methodology based on data and statistical analysis. The sheer quantity of available data is overwhelming and might provide one reason why such an analysis has not yet been undertaken.
Relevant data for these studies is available from a variety of sources, but two in particular are of note. First, legal database provider LexisNexis provides a huge amount of information about how the Court's opinions are treated by subsequent opinions; thus, if the Court later overrules one of its earlier opinions, that information is captured by LexisNexis. Second, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have compiled a database that provides detailed information about each Supreme Court decision. Combining these two sources into a coherent database will provide a treasure trove of results for future researchers to study, use, and build upon.
This thesis will explore a first-of-its-kind attempt to parse these massive datasets to provide a powerful tool for future researchers. It will also provide a window to help the average citizen understand Supreme Court behavior more clearly. By utilizing traditional data extraction and dataset analysis methods, many informative conclusions can be reached to help explain why the Court acts the way it does. For example, the results show that decisions decided by a narrow margin (i.e., by a 5 to 4 vote) are almost 4x more likely to be overruled than unanimous decisions by the Court. Many more results like these can be synthesized from the dataset and will be presented in this thesis. Possibly of higher importance, this thesis presents a framework to predict the outcomes of future and pending Supreme Court cases using statistical analysis of the data gleaned from the dataset.
In the end, this thesis strives to provide input data as well as results data for future researchers to use in studying Supreme Court behavior. It also provides a framework that researchers can use to analyze the input data to create even more results data.
Item Open Access Is Lady Justice Blind? Reading Brazil's 2012 Affirmative Action Decision Through the Struggle for Gender Equality(E-Legis - Revista Eletrônica do Programa de Pós-Graduação da Câmara dos Deputados, 2017-12) Knoll, TItem Open Access Judicial Review, the Long-Run Game: Endogenous Institutional Change at the U.S. Supreme Court(2014) Houck, Aaron MitchellIn this project, I examine why the judicial authority of the United States Supreme Court has increased. I propose a theoretical explanation of endogenous institutional change at the Court whereby the actions of the Court---specifically its decisions and the opinions in which it announces those decisions---have, over the long-run, altered the structures of the American separation-of-powers system. The Court has built up public support for the institution of judicial review to such a degree that its rulings are respected even when opposed by strong political actors---including the public. I evaluate this theory by analyzing three important transitional periods of Supreme Court history. The first case study explores the Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, and examines how the Court established judicial review as the most important means of constitutional interpretation. The second case study explores the Court's first cases interpreting the three Reconstruction Amendments, and shows that through these decisions the Court established itself as the arbiter of the meaning of these new amendments. The third case study looks at the Court's decision to hear reapportionment cases and its articulation of the political question doctrine that provided a legalistic method of expanding the political power of the Court. I conclude from these case studies that my theory provides a useful explanation for the expansion of judicial authority.
Item Open Access Newspapers and the Supreme Court: In re Capital Punishment(2014-01-30) Cai, HaoxiaohanThis paper examines how the Supreme Court and newsprint media interface with and react to each other’s arguments, justification, and framing of the death penalty. As the philosophical justification behind the use of capital punishment evolves, how can we describe the similarities and differences between how the Supreme Court frames issues of capital punishment and how the press portrays the same? Using a case-study analysis, this paper identifies three sets of chronologically- related and issue-related death penalty cases (from 1971 to 2005) and compares the presence and importance of the varying Supreme Court arguments and newspaper frames. I find that, while the Supreme Court appears to set the boundaries of the death penalty debate for newsprint media, the latter may actually set the agenda of the Court when it strategically 1.) makes comparisons to foreign legal practices or 2.) alleges that caprice and bias pervade through the American capital punishment mechanism.Item Open Access The Development and Resolution of Conflict Among Federal Appellate Courts(2022) Madan, NicolasCircuit splits, arising when U.S. Courts of Appeals create contradictory legal rules, are one of the most important phenomena in American law. Making up a significant proportion of the Supreme Court’s docket, cases involving conflicts among federal appellate courts – or circuit splits – present important legal questions, and their resolution often has a profound impact on future case law. Despite their importance, however, little is known about the conditions under which these conflicts are resolved, or the dynamics underpinning their resolution. This dissertation analyzes intercircuit conflicts as vehicles for Supreme Court policymaking, which Justices use to glean information about the level of resistance that nationally-binding precedent might encounter in the lower courts.
Using an original dataset of conflicts drawn from all petitions for certiorari that came before the Court in its 1986 and 1987 terms, the studies in this dissertation reach several findings that illuminate various aspects of conflict. Taking up the question of why the Court resolves some conflicts, but not others, Chapter 2 reports that the Court is more likely to resolve splits when it has more ideological allies among the lower courts involved in the conflict. Turning to the resolution of conflict cases, Chapter 3 shows that the justices make policy sacrifices at the merits stage, accommodating to the side of the conflict that is ideologically furthest from the median when there appears to be a consensus among lower courts favoring that side. This effect is specific to justices near the Court’s median, for whom the costs of accommodation are lowest, and also to cases in which lower courts have primary control over the implementation of the legal rule in future cases. In an investigation of lower court behavior, Chapter 4 presents evidence that position-taking in a conflict is independent of the prior history of decisions in the split, and that when the Supreme Court alters precedent across more circuits in its resolution of conflict, the amount of resistance to implementation of its opinion increases. Overall, this dissertation provides an account of conflict and a novel source of data that can contribute to debates surrounding federal judicial reform.
Item Open Access The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment(2019) Blalock, CorinneThis dissertation, “The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment” examines how the importation of private law and free market frameworks into public law have reshaped the Supreme Court’s understanding of equality and due process in areas as diverse as international arbitration, access to abortion, and affirmative action. My research draws on both legal and critical theory methods, reading studies of political economy alongside analysis of doctrinal and historical sources, to explore how the rhetoric of the market transforms and limits the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. This dissertation traces how the embrace of the models of efficiency, choice, and human capital by both liberal and conservative justices alike has eroded the law’s protective role. Equal protection and due process have been redefined according to the needs, logics, and limits of the market with consequences disproportionately borne by the poor and working class.