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.

Law's Empire

This article presents a review of the book “Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems,” by W.R. Scott.

Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.ap.5500015.pdf

The Macro Polity

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.0022-3816.2004.00301.x

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

We enter the debate over the role of sex in judging by addressing the two predominant empirical questions it raises: whether male and female judges decide cases distinctly (individual effects) and whether the presence of a female judge on a panel causes her male colleagues to behave differently (panel effects). We do not, however, rely exclusively on the predominant statistical models - variants of standard regression analysis - to address them. Because these tools alone are ill-suited to the task at hand, we deploy a more appropriate methodology - non-parametric matching - which follows from a formal framework for causal inference. Applying matching methods to sex discrimination suits resolved in the federal circuits between 1995 and 2002 yields two clear results. First, we observe substantial individual effects: The likelihood of a judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about 10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, we find that men are significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant when a woman serves on the panel. Both effects are so persistent and consistent that they may come as a surprise even to those scholars who have long posited the existence of gendered judging.

/pdf/untangling-the-causal-effects-of-sex-on-judging-2emg8qg0kp.pdf

Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging

This is an exploration of the institutional judicial activism of the US Supreme Court through the dramatic changes in its agenda, as it has evolved from 1933 to the present. Once dominated by economic issues, the Supreme Court's agenda is now populated largely by cases involving individual rights and liberties. This shift is hardly accidental, the author argues, and he offers quantitative as well as qualitative assessments of the means and motivations for change. More than 7500 cases serve as the basis of analysis, and the narrative is amplified by an explanation of the author's case taxonomy, a chronology of the Court justices, a list of cases cited and a digest of key cases.

The Transformation Of The Supreme Court's Agenda: From The New Deal To The Reagan Administration

There are three general models of Supreme Court decision making: the legal model, the attitudinal model and the strategic model But each is somewhat incomplete This book advances an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that incorporates variables from each of the three models In examining the modern Supreme Court, since Brown v Board of Education, the book argues that decisions are a function of the sincere preferences of the justices, the nature of precedent, and the development of the particular issue, as well as separation of powers and the potential constraints posed by the president and Congress To test this model, the authors examine all full, signed civil liberties and economic cases decisions in the 1953–2000 period Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court argues, and the results confirm, that judicial decision making is more nuanced than the attitudinal or legal models have argued in the past

/pdf/decision-making-by-the-modern-supreme-court-4b7zsap9d1.pdf

Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court

This analysis seeks to understand the decline of Supreme Court consensual norms often attributed to the failed leadership of Chief Justice Stone. A new unit of analysis—justice-level dissent and concurrence rates—supports an alternative view of observed increases in dissensual decision making. When these measures are estimated with time- series techniques, results offer evidence of multiple changepoints in this norm of the Court that both lead and lag Stone's elevation. Broader contextual explanations related to the alteration of the Court's discretionary issue agenda and its ideological and demographic composition also contribute to fractures in the once-unanimous voting coalitions.

Dissensual Decision Making: Revisiting the Demise of Consensual Norms within the U.S. Supreme Court

In the relationship between the Supreme Court and lower courts, one important issue is the extent to which lower court judges recognize and respond to the Supreme Court's authority. This article explores the Court's authority through a study of cases remanded by the Court during the 1965-1974 terms. We examine the relationship between the outcomes of cases in the lower courts after Supreme Court remands and several conditions that seem likely to affect the strength of the Court's authority. The statistical results indicate that most of these conditions have a significant impact on outcomes. More broadly, these results provide evidence that the Court's authority is a significant force in shaping the behavior of judges in the lower courts.

Supreme Court Authority in the Judiciary A Study of Remands

The Supreme Court in the American Legal System. By Jeffrey A. Segal, Harold J. Spaeth, and Sara C. Benesh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 416p. 28.99 paper.If there is any example of a Kuhnian paradigm in political science, it would be the attitudinal model in Supreme Court decision making. Over a half century ago, C. Herman Pritchett boldly showed data that revealed “political” decision making by the justices of the nation's high court. Harold Spaeth was among the pioneers in this research and is now regarded as its strongest adherent. The justification for the Supreme Court Attitudinal Model, known to friends and foes alike by the acronym “SCAM,” is relatively simple: The preponderance of individual-level decision making can be explained as a function of the attitudes of the justices. Like the ideal model, it is parsimonious and explains a great deal of variance. Even those who have been critical of SCAM concede that the attitudes of the justices are the most important determinant of individual-level decision making at the Supreme Court level.

Richard L. Pacelle

Papers

The Transformation Of The Supreme Court's Agenda: From The New Deal To The Reagan Administration

Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court

Dissensual Decision Making: Revisiting the Demise of Consensual Norms within the U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court Authority in the Judiciary A Study of Remands

The Supreme Court in the American Legal System