Judicial opinion

About: Judicial opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5300 publications have been published within this topic receiving 64803 citations.

Court-Driven Reform and Equal Educational Opportunity: Centralization, Decentralization, and the Shifting Judicial Role

Abstract: Judicial decisions focusing on equal educational opportunity involve significant issues of educational governance and often involve explicit questions about the extent to which authority to make educational decisions should be centralized or decentralized across various institutions and entities. This review aims at clarifying scholars’ understanding of court-driven reform of educational governance to leverage equal educational opportunities across the major fields of school desegregation, school finance reform, and school choice. Issues of centralization and decentralization have particularly emerged in courts’ approaches to these fields with respect to both the judicial process and the substance of the policies themselves. An examination of these issues reveals a movement toward the decentralization of authority away from the courts that, at times, has reflected a growing judicial awareness of the courts’ strengths and weaknesses. Based on this examination, a more effective role for the courts in reform...

Narrow versus broad judicial decisions

Abstract: A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judicial ‘minimalism’ holds that judges should rule narrowly because they lack the knowledge required to make general rules to govern unknown future circumstances. In this paper, we challenge this argument. Our argument focuses on the fact that, by shaping the legal landscape, judicial decisions affect the policies that are adopted, and that may therefore subsequently be challenged before the court. Using a simple model, we demonstrate that in such a dynamic setting, in which current decisions shape future cases, judges with limited knowledge confront incentives to rule broadly precisely because they are ignorant.

Politicization and the Two Modes of Evaluating Judicial Decisions

Abstract: Since courts lack control of the purse and the sword, understanding what causes the public to accept court decisions is essential. Using three studies, this paper shows that the public’s perception of the process judges use to make decisions changes the determinants of acceptance. When judges are perceived as using a principled decision-making process, institutional loyalty determines acceptance. When judges are perceived as using a politicized decision-making process, agreement with the policy implications of a decision determines acceptance. These results emphasize the importance of decision-making process perceptions in ensuring that courts can induce voluntary acceptance of their decisions.

Deportation Decisions: Judicial Decision-Making in an American Immigration Court:

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic observations and informal conversations with judges in Dallas Immigration Court, as well as archival documents, this article describes two approaches through which judges in...

The influence of presidential versus home state senatorial preferences on the policy output of judges on the United States district courts

Abstract: While many of the decisions of federal district court judges involve the routine application of settled legal rules, a significant minority of their decisions present the judges with the opportunity to engage in judicial policy making. A considerable body of literature suggests that when faced with policy-making opportunities, the policy preferences of the judges exert a significant impact on the nature of those decisions. The present study explores the question of whose preferences are manifested in the policy-relevant decisions of the district court judges. In particular, we seek to determine the relative impact of the preferences of the major elites involved in the selection of federal district judges: the appointing president, home state senators of the president's party, and home state elites outside the Senate who are consulted when a president makes an appointment from a state whose Senate delegation is in the hands of the opposition party. The analysis is based on all published decisions of the district courts in civil liberties, economic and labor, and criminal procedure cases decided between 1961 and 1995. We find that contrary to the expectations derived from the existing literature on district judge appointments, the political preferences of the appointing presidents are most closely related to the policy relevant decisions of the judges. Introduction The U.S. district courts represent the basic point of input for the federal judiciary and are the "workhorses" of the federal system (Carp & Stidham 1998:23). Since the vast majority of their decisions are not appealed, district judges often have the last say about most of the legal issues resolved in federal court. Those decisions increasingly extend to a host of new issues with controversial political implications: the availability of abortions, standards for defining obscenity, the quality of the air we breathe, requirements for affirmative action programs, standards for the maintenance of prisons, what plea bargains would be accepted in political corruption investigations like Watergate, and the admissibility of evidence from searches and confessions in high-profile criminal prosecutions (Goulden 1974; Rowland & Carp 1996). While many of their decisions involve the routine application of settled legal rules, a significant minority of their decisions, especially those published in the Federal Supplement, present the judges with the opportunity to engage in judicial policy making. A considerable body of literature suggests that when judges are faced with policy-making opportunities, their policy preferences exert a significant impact on the nature of those decisions (Carp & Rowland 1983; Rowland & Carp 1996; Richardson & Vines 1970; Rowland & Carp 1983; Peltason 1955). The present study explores the question of whose preferences are manifested in the policy-relevant decisions of the district court judges. In particular, we seek to determine the relative impact of the preferences of the major elites involved in the selection of federal district judges: the appointing president, home state senators of the president's party, and home state elites outside the Senate who are consulted when a president makes an appointment from a state whose Senate delegation is in the hands of the opposition party. The Appointment of District Court Judges "In form, the appointment of federal judges could not be simpler: they are nominated by the President and affirmed by majority vote of the Senate" (Richardson & Vines 1970:58). In practice, however, more actors are involved than just the president and the Senate sitting as a collective body, and the politics of the process varies in significant ways for judges nominated to different courts. Examinations of the politics of judicial selection have concluded that even at the bottom of the judicial hierarchy where local political forces have their greatest impact, the president is a key player (Carp & Stidham 1998; Goldman 1997; Richardson & Vines 1970; Rowland & Carp 1996). …