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Keith E. Whittington

Bio: Keith E. Whittington is an academic researcher from Princeton University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Supreme court & Politics. The author has an hindex of 17, co-authored 120 publications receiving 1627 citations. Previous affiliations of Keith E. Whittington include University Press of Kansas & The Catholic University of America.


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TL;DR: The politics of federal judicial appointments is as heated and as high-profile now as it has ever been in American history as discussed by the authors, and as a result both parties have been pushed to treat judicial appointments as an important political battleground.
Abstract: The politics of federal judicial appointments is as heated and as high-profile now as it has ever been in American history. For an important segment of both political parties, the federal courts have become a critical policymaking institution, and as a result both parties have been pushed to treat judicial appointments as an important political battleground. It is worth pausing to assess descriptively just how difficult it has become to place judges on the federal bench in the current age of party polarization and how the White House and the Senate have responded to the gridlock and sought to ease the possibility of judicial appointments on a simple majority basis. In an era of heightened ideological conflict, partisans might be tempted to go further and take extraordinary measures to construct a politically pliable judiciary, a risky step in a climate of close partisan competition.

3 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: The Roberts Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is the least activist Supreme Court in American history as mentioned in this paper, and it has been widely recognized as the most conservative Court in history, but it has not been frequently observed that the Roberts Court has been remarkably reluctant to exercise the power of judicial review.
Abstract: Not too many years ago, scholars could reasonably speak of the U.S. Supreme Court as being among the most activist in American history. Both empirical and normative scholarship was driven by the sense of a Court that was aggressive in the assertion of its own supremacy and active in the exercise of the power of judicial review. The Court under Chief Justice John Roberts cannot be viewed in the same way. The Roberts Court has issued its share of controversial constitutional decisions, but a rarely observed but important feature of the Roberts Court is its unusual restraint in the exercise of judicial review. By some measures, in fact, the Roberts Court can thus far be called the least activist Supreme Court in history. This Article demonstrates that the Roberts Court is deserving of that title and investigates some features of the exercise of judicial review of the current Court compared to its recent predecessors. The Court has become less likely to strike down federal laws, but importantly it has become far less likely to invalidate state laws. Although the willingness of modern conservative jurists to strike down statutes is notable, the declining ability of the liberals on the Court to form majorities willing to strike down state laws has been particularly important to the creation of a restrained Court. The return of judicial activism on the Supreme Court is likely to depend on the appointment of more liberal Justices to the Court who could press the constitutional views that are now most often expressed in dissent. INTRODUCTION Not too many years ago, both activists and scholars were increasingly alarmed by the apparent activism of the U.S. Supreme Court. Such critiques of the Court have gradually faded, but have certainly not disappeared. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg only recently insisted that she needed to stay on the Court in order to oppose what is "one of the most activist courts in history." (1) The Justices are still subjected to denunciations of particular decisions, but broad-gauged attacks on the activism of the Court have seemingly receded. The shifting critiques of the Court reflect an underlying reality. In recent years the Court has been less active in exercising the power of judicial review than it has at any point in its modern history. But even the earlier critiques of an apparently activist Court obscured underlying trends in judicial review. The Roberts Court is notably conservative, but that simple label provides only a partial description of the recent Court. Chief Justice John Roberts is himself part of a conservative majority that has often been able to shape the recent development of constitutional law. But the Court remains divided between more conservative and more liberal Justices, and those coalitions offer competing visions of what the constitutional rules are and how they ought to be applied. Over time, the liberal wing of the Court has often been able to form majorities to strike down legislation, usually over the objections of the conservative wing. Ironically, it is Ginsburg herself who is among the most activist Justices on the current Court and represents the most likely source of increased judicial invalidations. (2) It has not been frequently observed that the Roberts Court has been remarkably reluctant to exercise the power of judicial review. The Court in recent years has struck down federal laws in fewer cases than has its predecessors. More importantly, the Court has struck down state laws in far fewer cases than has been routine for the past century. This Court could plausibly be described as the least activist Court in history, and this recent pattern should also cause us to reevaluate the claims of activism during the late Rehnquist Court. This Article proceeds in stages. Part I reviews claims that the contemporary Court has been the most activist in history. Part II develops the case for thinking that the Roberts Court has instead been the least activist. …

3 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: We tell stories, about ourselves and others, to ourselves and others. The stories help us answer such questions as who we are as a people and what we hold to be valuable. They do the political work of holding the country together, or tearing it apart, of building up political coalitions and inspiring them to action. Rogers M. Smith has long been interested in such stories. He has, perhaps, listened to them more carefully than most, and as a result has found new insights into what kind of people we Americans are and has laid bare how we have struggled over our ideals and aspirations. Smith works at the intersection of American politics, public law, and political theory. Across a range of both theoretical and substantive works, he has argued that ideas matter in politics. Empirical scholars of politics have long emphasized the primacy of material interests in driving political behavior. Ideas can be all too easily dismissed as interesting in the seminar room but epiphenomenal in the meeting hall. But, Smith argues, ideas are not merely philosophically interesting. They shape how we understand our interests and how we conceive of our identities. We misunderstand political development if we cannot account for how the realm of ideas shapes our social and political reality. Smith was a leading figure in linking the study of law, courts, and the Constitution in political science to the emerging field of American political development. Although that research often highlighted the study of historical politics, Smith was among those who emphasized that the point of studying politics and history was not merely to understand the past but to understand how the past helps form the present and how the dynamics of politics work over time. Enduring social structures, including ideological constructs and traditions, channel daily politics, and politics encompasses not only how individuals make choices within those institutional arrangements but also how they struggle to overcome or reinforce those inheritances. His particular substantive interests have become all too relevant to our current political moment. Smith has been fascinated by the construction of political identity, including perhaps the most fundamental legal identity of citizenship. The meaning and boundaries of American citizenship have been points of political contestation for as long as there has been a country. While liberal values have often been central to those debates, racial politics have been a persistent feature as well. Not just an unfortunate sideshow, arguments about race have been an integral element of the American political tradition. The recurrent dream of a postracial America has been repeatedly dashed by darker forces that insist that race is constitutive of America. We have not told one story about ourselves. We have told many, and those stories fit uneasily alongside one another. Smith was born in South Carolina but soon moved with his family to Springfield, Illinois. His traditionally Southern Democratic family had drifted into the pro-business Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower. Hailing from a politically engaged clan, Smith developed an early interest in politics and spent his high school years climbing the ranks of the Illinois Teen-Age Republican Federation, but by the end of the 1960s he had soured on the political culture of Illinois and of the post-Barry Goldwater GOP. Politically rudderless, he was attracted by the emphasis on big questions in political philosophy at James Madison College at Michigan State University and enrolled there in 1971. At Michigan State, he was exposed to such dedicated instructors as Richard Zinman, Ken Waltzer, and Peter Lyman. He discovered a passion for political 2018–2019 APSA President

3 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics as discussed by the authors provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization.
Abstract: The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics (Oxford University Press), edited by Keith E. Whittington (Princeton University), R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University) and Gregory A. Caldeira (Ohio State University), is part of the multi-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. Featuring 50 scholars and 45 chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to critical appraisals of the key issues shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

3 citations


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Book
01 Jan 1996
TL;DR: A review of the collected works of John Tate can be found in this paper, where the authors present two volumes of the Abel Prize for number theory, Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre.
Abstract: This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

2,014 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: McQueen et al. as mentioned in this paper presented a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby.
Abstract: Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

1,813 citations

MonographDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea and Mongolia, and argue that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests.
Abstract: New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing 'insurance' to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

737 citations