Showing papers on "Majority opinion published in 2017"

Climate Change: US Public Opinion

Abstract: A review of research findings and polling data about Americans’ attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans’ attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideological polarization enhanced by communications from elites. But features of the climate change problem elicit some distinctive determinants of opinion, including individuals’ trust in science, risk processing, and personal experience. Although our review of the literature and data leaves us skeptical that majority opinion will spur elected officials anytime soon to undertake the costly solutions necessary to tackle this problem comprehensively at the national level, we identify several avenues by which attitudes might promote less substantial but nevertheless conseque...

Monitoring the Opinion of the Crowd: Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Public Opinion Perceptions on Social Media

Abstract: Social media technologies offer several features that allow users to monitor other people’s opinions on public issues. Initial research showed that user-generated content can shape recipients’ perceptions of the majority opinion on societal problems. Still, it remains largely unexplored under which circumstances people gauge other users’ opinions through social media and whether perceived opinion climates affect people’s opinions and communication behavior in these environments. Results of a two-session experiment revealed that people’s fear of isolation sharpens their attention toward user-generated comments on Facebook which, in turn, affect recipients’ public opinion perceptions. The latter influenced subjects’ opinions and their willingness to participate in social media discussions. These findings are discussed in light of the spiral of silence theory and the social projection hypothesis.

Reconsidering Positivity Theory: What Roles do Politicization, Ideological Disagreement, and Legal Realism Play in Shaping U.S. Supreme Court Legitimacy?

Abstract: To what degree is the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court currently at risk? Perhaps the most widely accepted view of how the Supreme Court acquires and maintains its legitimacy is positivity theory, which claims that the legitimizing symbols of judicial authority protect the Court's legitimacy from dissatisfaction with its rulings. Although research has shown that belief in legal realism does not itself threaten the Court's legitimacy, positivity theory suggests that portrayals of the Court as embroiled in politics—that is, as “just another political institution”—can undermine institutional legitimacy. Still, some recent research recognizes that ideological disagreement poses a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Missing from extant literature is a reconciliation of how these three determinants—ideological dissatisfaction, legal realism, and perceptions of judicial politicization—combine to structure judicial legitimacy. Understanding the difference between perceptions of an “ideological” Court versus a “politicized” Court for institutional legitimacy is our central purpose in this article. We discover that the greatest threats to the Court's legitimacy lie in beliefs that judges are just ordinary politicians (not in ideological dissatisfaction or legal realism). We conclude by drawing out these findings’ implications for the upcoming highly politicized battles over nominations to the high bench.

Learning in the Judicial Hierarchy

Abstract: I argue the Supreme Court learns to craft legal rules by relying on the Courts of Appeals as laboratories of law, observing their decisions and reviewing those that best inform legal development. I develop a model that shows how the Supreme Court leverages multiple Courts of Appeals decisions to identify which will be most informative to review, and what decision to make upon review. Because an unbiased judge only makes an extreme decision when there is an imbalance in the parties’ evidence, the Supreme Court is able to draw inferences from cases it chooses not to review. The results shed light on how hierarchy eases the inherent difficulty and uncertainty of crafting law and on how the Supreme Court learns to create doctrine.

How Expected Political and Legal Impact Drive Media Coverage of Supreme Court Cases

Abstract: Media coverage of Supreme Court decisions is not well-understood, with studies typically focusing on features of decisions such as issue area and opinion authorship, and ignoring the political and legal importance of those decisions. Because the Court is both secretive and esoteric, and because it does not engage in traditional public relations activities, media must proxy importance by looking to available cues, such as interest group participation. Importantly, some indicators of importance are available before a decision is rendered; thus I examine both pre- and post-decision media coverage of cases. I show that expected legal and political impact drive media coverage of Court decisions, and that the decision-level features that prior studies have focused on are much less important in determining coverage than has been previously thought.

Impact: The Supreme Court in American Politics

Abstract: In this dissertation I seek to answer the question: when, how, and under what conditions does the Supreme Court make or influence policy and politics in the United States? In working to answer this question, I demonstrate that the Supreme Court has significantly more power and influence than scholars have typically given it credit for. I argue that the nature of the Court’s power is interpretive: it is the power to say what the law is. This power gives the Court the ability to make policy routinely, in every case that comes before it. Often the exercise of this policymaking power is mundane, but sometimes it is profound. By shifting focus away from compliance—the dominant focus in the empirical literature on Court power—and towards interpretation, I significantly extend the range of cases and the scope of outcomes of decisions covered by the theory of power. Finally, this theory of power allows me to develop a theory of judicial impact. I contend that judicial impact has two key sources: judicial power, and indirect judicial influence, by which I mean any action which is attributable to an exercise of judicial power, but which is not a direct outcome of any power relationship. For example, political elites respond to Court decisions, other institutions rationally anticipate Court action, and judicial decisions can incentivize or discourage activism, lobbying, legislation, litigation, and more. In short, this points to the utility of expanding the study of judicial impact to encompass all policy-relevant outcomes of judicial action, and the theory offered here provides an anchor for this approach as well as a framework for systematizing a wide range of different impacts. I go on to show that the Court’s indirect influence can be seen in that its decisions routinely affect media coverage of the issues on which it speaks, as well the policymaking agendas of the president and the political parties. In other words, I show that the Court indirectly influences policy in a number of ways, one of which is to alter the political agenda of the public and of other policymaking institutions in the United States. IMPACT: THE SUPREME COURT IN AMERICAN POLITICS by Logan Strother B.A., Missouri University of Science & Technology, 2010 M.A., Southern Illinois University, 2012 M.A., Syracuse University, 2013 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Syracuse University June 2017 Copyright © Logan Strother 2017 All Rights Reserved

A Consensus Approach to the Sentiment Analysis Problem Driven by Support-Based IOWA Majority

Abstract: In group decision making, there are many situations where the opinion of the majority of participants is critical. The scenarios could be multiple, like a number of doctors finding commonality on the diagnose of an illness or parliament members looking for consensus on an specific law being passed. In this article, we present a method that utilizes induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA) operators to aggregate a majority opinion from a number of sentiment analysis (SA) classification systems, where the latter occupy the role usually taken by human decision-makers as typically seen in group decision situations. In this case, the numerical outputs of different SA classification methods are used as input to a specific IOWA operator that is semantically close to the fuzzy linguistic quantifier ‘most of’. The object of the aggregation will be the intensity of the previously determined sentence polarity in such a way that the results represent what the majority think. During the experimental phase, the use of the IOWA operator coupled with the linguistic quantifier ‘most’ (math formula) proved to yield superior results compared to those achieved when utilizing other techniques commonly applied when some sort of averaging is needed, such as arithmetic mean or median techniques.

Supreme Court Precedent in a Judicial Hierarchy

Abstract: We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court’s use of its summary decisions, which explicitly reference its formally argued decisions, increase circuit court utility of the High Court’s precedents. We test our predictions using new data on appeals court responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. The empirical results support our account and shed new light on the hierarchical dynamic within the American federal judiciary.

The Complexities of State Court Compliance with U.S. Supreme Court Precedent

Abstract: The United States Supreme Court has significant influence over the development of legal policy, yet it must rely on external actors to bring to fruition the desired effect of its decisions. Among the most important such actors are state high courts who are often motivated to issue decisions promoting policies at odds with the U.S. Supreme Court and who have mechanisms to legitimize such decisions. This study builds on existing work on state court compliance with U.S. Supreme Court precedent by introducing a new theoretical framework that accounts for the impact of state-specific precedent vitality, or the degree to which the high court of a specific state has positively treated a U.S. Supreme Court precedent, on state high court compliance. Our analysis of state high court treatment of Miller v. California provides strong evidence for the importance of state-specific vitality as a determinant of state high court compliance.

Transforming court governance in Victoria

Abstract: This thesis by publication analyses the emergence of independent judicial councils and their role in facilitating judicial control of court administration in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, the USA and other countries. While much research has been conducted into the relative merits of judicial control of court administration, the thesis extends the court governance literature by developing an analytical policy framework for a model Judicial Council of Victoria with broad statutory responsibility for improving the quality of justice in the court system. The thesis then applies the proposed analytical model to assess the legal and institutional framework of Court Services Victoria (‘CSV’), which was established in 2014 in order to transfer the responsibility for court administration from the executive government to the judiciary. The thesis argues that an independent judicial council, such as CSV, requires a strong developmental mandate to assist the courts improve their operations and respond to a multitude of internal and external challenges that they inherited from the executive system of court administration. At the level of the courts, the framework envisages the establishment of a compact management board, comprising executive judges and the court CEO, which is modelled upon a corporate board of executive directors, with full responsibility for court administration.

Judges on judging : views from the bench

Abstract: Let the Judges tell your students how they reach a verdict. Thoroughly revised, with expanded historical and international coverage, "Judges on Judging" offers insights into the judicial philosophies and political views of those on the bench. In this wide-ranging collection, Supreme Court justices, as well as lower federal and state court judges, discuss the judicial process, constitutional and statutory interpretation, judicial federalism, and the role of the judiciary. New selections come from such distinguished jurists as Judge Jerome Frank (U.S. Court of Appeals), Judge D. Brock Hornby (U.S. District Court), Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. (Supreme Court of the United States), Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo (Supreme Court of the United States), and Chief Justice Aharon Barak (Supreme Court of Israel). With updated introductions to provide students with necessary thematic and historical context, this book is the perfect supplement to present a nuanced view of the judiciary.

Issue Divisions and US Supreme Court Decision Making

Abstract: Majority opinions are the most important output of the US Supreme Court, not only disposing the instant case but also providing guidance for other institutions, lower courts, and litigants as to the state of the law. The authoring of dissenting opinions, though, is frequently regarded as deleterious to the Court’s institutional legitimacy and the efficacy of the majority opinion. Leveraging the content of all Court opinions between 1979 and 2009, I argue dissenting justices use dissenting opinions to strategically alter the issue dimensions addressed in the majority opinion. An examination of the effect of separate opinion content on majority opinions indicates dissenting opinions yield majority opinions addressing a greater number of topics, and I provide evidence that the dynamic is driven by the strategic behavior of dissenting justices seeking to realign the Court.

The Supreme Court and the Judicial Genre

Abstract: This paper exploits a relatively new approach to quantitative text analysis — topic modeling — to examine the subject matter of Supreme Court decisions, and in particular to analyze how the semantic content produced by the Court differs from the published decisions of the U.S. Appellate Courts. To conduct this analysis, we fit a topic model to the joint corpus of decisions (Supreme Court plus Appellate Court). The topic model enables a quantitative measurement of differences in semantic content between three corpora: the Supreme Court decisions, the Appellate Court decisions, and Appellate Court cases selected for review. We develop new methods to estimate these differences over time. We reach two findings. First, the Supreme Court has become substantially more semantically idiosyncratic in recent decades, as measured by the use of the topic distribution within a decision as a predictor of the authoring court. We then examine potential causes of this trend, isolating the use of the Court’s case selection power. We find that the topic model based measure of semantic difference between the cases selected for review by the Court does not appear to be increasing over time, indicating instead that the Court has become more distinctive in how it discusses a similarly distinct pool of cases. Normative implications and avenues for future research are discussed. This work demonstrates the utility of topic modeling as a valuable supplement to and/or replacement of hand-coded labels in the study of hierarchically arranged judiciaries. While this case study focuses on the U. S. Courts, extensions and broadening to other national and international judicial corpora can be readily accomplished. More generally, this work opens the door for broader application of topic models within empirical legal studies and related disciplines to study the rich textual corpora generated by legal institutions.

How Much Has the Supreme Court Changed Patent Law

Abstract: The U.S. Supreme Court has decided a remarkable number of patent cases in the past decade, particularly as compared to the first twenty years of the Federal Circuit’s existence. No longer is the Federal Circuit “the de facto Supreme Court of patents,” as Mark Janis wrote in 2001. Rather, it seems the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court of patents. In the article at the center of this symposium, Judge Timothy Dyk of the Federal Circuit writes that the Supreme Court’s decisions “have had a major impact on patent law,” citing, among other evidence, the Court’s seventy percent reversal rate in Federal Circuit cases. In this essay, I suggest that the Supreme Court’s effect on patent law has actually been more limited, for two reasons in particular. First, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, though substantial in number, have rarely involved the fundamental legal doctrines that directly ensure the inventiveness of patents and regulate their scope. Second, the Supreme Court’s minimalist approach to opinion writing in patent cases frequently enables the Federal Circuit to ignore the Court’s changes to governing doctrine.

Family Court of Australia

Abstract: This Court deals with cases under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), see Family relationships. There is a right of appeal to the

Triaging the Law: Developing the Common Law on the Supreme Court of India

Abstract: Legal precedent serves as the foundation of the common law. Judges provide their reasoning through precedent, citing cases to support their conclusion while distinguishing between cases cited by that counsel in favor of an opposing result. Legal precedent also provides the mechanism by which judges communicate with one another, at the same time providing guidance to prospective litigants and the practicing bar. This process is particularly important for supreme courts, whose decisions bind all lower courts within their jurisdiction. For this reason, in most common‐law jurisdictions, the supreme court decides relatively few cases but draws heavily on precedent for the opinions it issues. The Supreme Court in India stands in contrast to its counterparts in countries such as the United States and Canada in that it decides thousands, rather than tens, of cases. Examining the universe of Court decisions from 1950–2010, we find that the Court elects not to cite precedent in nearly half its opinions. In turn, these opinions without citation to precedent are rarely subsequently cited. However, there is a second set of decisions that is more analogous to U.S. Supreme Court decisions. These decisions do cite prior decisions and are cited by later cases. Opinions that do cite precedent gravitate to older opinions, whose salience often endures for decades. These findings suggest the Court is constrained in its ability to process a heavy caseload, and makes strategic decisions as to which opinions to emphasize through its use of precedent.

Evaluating the Effects of Multiple Opinion Rationales on Supreme Court Legitimacy

Abstract: The literature on the U.S. Supreme Court has paid substantial attention to the perceived legitimacy of the Court’s decisions. However, much less attention has been paid to the perceived legitimacy of the reasons the Court provides for its opinions. We design two experiments to understand how the public perceives opinion content. Unlike prior studies, we take it as a given that the Court uses legal reasons in its decisions. This offers us a baseline by which to compare departures from these legal reasons. We find that extralegal reasons, when paired with legal reasons, do nothing to harm the legitimacy of the Court. Furthermore, we find that even with a lack of legal reasons, the use of extralegal reasons does not harm the legitimacy of the Court, even among those who find that these reasons are inappropriate for the Court to use.

Explaining Difference in the Quantity of Supreme Court Revisions: A Model for Judicial Uniformity

Abstract: While civil law supreme courts (e.g., Italy, France, Chile) hear up to 90% of the petitions for revisions, common law supreme courts (e.g., U.S., U.K, Canada) hear as low as 1% of the same type of cases. In this study we postulate that these different commitments towards revisions are each consistent with different approaches by which the legal system provides judicial uniformity. We formulate a theoretical model that shows that a given level of uniformity in lower (or appeal) court decisions can be achieved either by fixing a given probability of judicial revision or a given monetary/non-monetary disutility associated with a reversal. Hence, despite the fact that common law legal systems are characterized by a lower probability of case revision, we cannot state a priori that judicial uniformity is greater in civil law systems, as this will depend upon the magnitude of the disutility associated with a reversed decision. Indeed, with the exception of the impact upon career concerns (which net effect is not clear) in terms of ideology, reputation and legal standards, reversal disutility seems to be much higher in common law systems than in civil law systems. In addition, we demonstrate that in an efficient legal system the optimal number of revisions increases with the size of the reversal disutility, but decreases with the probability that the supreme court makes erroneous decisions; the total number of cases soliciting revision and the intrinsic utility obtained by a lower court which enforces its desired rule. We also show that in an efficient legal system it is the judicial law-making role of a common law supreme court that explains why that Court revises fewer cases than a civil law supreme court.

The Decline of Supreme Court Deference to the President

Abstract: According to entrenched conventional wisdom, the president enjoys considerable advantages over other litigants in the Supreme Court. Because of the central role of the presidency in the U.S. government, and the expertise and experience of the Solicitor General’s office, the president usually wins. However, a new analysis of the data reveals that the conventional wisdom is out of date. The historical dominance of the president in the Supreme Court reached its apex in the Reagan administration, which won nearly 80% of the cases, and has declined steadily since then. In the Obama administration, the presidency suffered its worst win rate, barely 50%. After documenting this trend, we discuss possible explanations. We find evidence that the trend may be due to growing self-assertion of the Court and the development of a specialized private Supreme Court bar. We find no evidence for two other possible explanations — that the trend is due to greater executive overreaching than in the past, or ideological disagreements between the Court and the presidency.

How Silencing of Dissent in Science Impacts Woman. The Gardasil® Story

Abstract: The issues of safety and efficacy of certain vaccines remains extremely contentious. The venues for this debate have included periodicals, documentary films, and an ever-increasing number of on-line sites. While debate in science is not only a common occurrence but a fundamental tenet of the scientific community, it only works when divergent opinions can be heard. When those who hold an opposing opinion are denigrated and/or marginalized by those holding the majority opinion such as in the issue of vaccination, where cultural authority for the issue is owned by the profession of medicine, both science and the public lose. What is often forgotten are the benefits derived from the questioning of drug safety that not only extends to the public but to physicians who rely on the truthfulness and accuracy of the information that is being supplied to them by manufactures and government agencies. While most physicians believe they are functioning in their patient’s best interest when making vaccine recommendations, these recommendations by in large have become a matter of rote and are made because most physicians have bought into the “vaccines are safe” mantra. What most physicians don’t realize is they have unknowingly been recruited by big pharma to assist in shutting down the vaccination debate. This suppression of vaccine opposition even among academics, is becoming more commonplace and will lead down a slippery slope that will silence opposition science, and the dangers that come with this. Those who question vaccine safety have been ostracized, misquoted and even made to appear mentally ill by those who hold the majority opinion on the issue. Physicians who question vaccine safety have had their licenses threatened or have been fired from positions. Tactics such as name calling and the use of terms such as pseudo-science, (even when the evidence being presented is from widely accepted peer-reviewed journals) or “conspiracy theorists” which has the effect of placing those holding the minority opinion in the category of such groups as 9/11 truthers, are not uncommon. Other methods of curtailing the presentation of opposing vaccine views have included pressuring venues not to allow anti-vaccination proponents to appear, or using the media to “expose” anti-vaccination groups as “crack-pots” while simultaneously presenting the majority opinion and the presenters as the sole arbiters on the issue. The more extreme elements of the pro-vaccine group will even make the statement that the issue is settled and there is no need for discussion. “Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values

Can a Court Change the Law by Saying Nothing

Abstract: Can an appellate court alter substantive law without writing an opinion? We attempt to answer that question by conducting a novel empirical investigation into how the Federal Circuit has implemented the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, the most recent in a series of Supreme Court decisions strengthening patent law’s patentable subject matter requirement. Our dataset includes each one of the Federal Circuit’s more than 100 decisions on patentable subject matter in the three years since Alice, including affirmances issued without an opinion under Federal Circuit Rule 36. Including those no-opinion affirmances, the Federal Circuit has found the patent to be invalid in more than ninety percent of its decisions. The court’s precedential opinions, however, tell a different story: nearly a quarter of them favor the patentee by rejecting challenges to patent validity. This difference is due largely to one remarkable fact: Although the court has issued over fifty Rule 36 affirmances finding the asserted patent to be invalid, it has not issued a single Rule 36 affirmance when finding in favor of a patentee. Rather, it has written an opinion in every one of those cases. As a result, the Federal Circuit’s precedential opinions provide an inaccurate picture of how disputes over patentable subject matter are actually resolved. Those opinions suggest that any given patent has a decent chance of surviving an eligibility challenge at the Federal Circuit. But, in reality, very few patents do. Our findings suggest that, by saying nothing, a court can indeed affect substantive law, or at least the perception of it. This has interesting implications both for the on-going debate over the legality of Rule 36 and, more broadly, for understanding the differences between the law on the books and the actual experience of litigants.

Reading Deboer and Obergefell through the “Moral Readings Versus Originalisms”. Debate: from Constitutional “Empty Cupboards” to Evolving Understandings

Abstract: This essay assesses the debate over “moral reading” and “originalist” approaches to constitutional interpretation, as elaborated in James E. Fleming, Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution: For Moral Readings and Against Originalism (2015), by evaluating the recent, momentous constitutional controversy in the United Sates of America over access by same-sex couples to civil marriage. Justice Kennedy’s landmark majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which held that such couples have a fundamental right to marry, employed a “moral reading” in emphasizing evolving understandings of constitutional guarantees of equality, the “promise of liberty” and the institution of marriage. By contrast to the dissenters, the majority rejected a static, narrow reading of the fundamental right to marry —and marriage— and stressed the role “insight” and generational progress. Evolving understanding played a similar role in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2013), which provided a template for Kennedy’s rejection of a narrow originalism focused only on historical practices or original intent. Such moral readings of the Constitution have played a significant role in making the Fourteenth Amendment less of (in Justice Ginsburg’s words) an “empty cupboard” for gay men and lesbians, just as they have played a role in making it less empty in the context of sex equality. This essay demonstrates how the contrasting approaches to interpretation in the majority and dissenting opinions in DeBoer v. Snyder (reversed by Obergefell) previewed the interpretive battle between the Obergefell majority and dissents, but with the sides reversed. It then observes that, while some legal scholars offered, in amicus briefs filed in Obergefell, originalist arguments for same-sex marriage, such arguments persuaded neither other originalist scholars nor the Obergefell dissenters.

Keeping up Appearances: Non-Policy Court Responses to Public Opinion

Abstract: Existing studies of Supreme Court behavior largely have focused on the Court's policy responses to non-judicial institutions. Recognizing the Court's need to maintain its institutional legitimacy, ...

From Individual Judge to Judicial Bureaucracy: The Emergence of Judicial Councils and the Changing Nature of Judicial Accountability in Court Administration

Abstract: This article analyses the emergence of judicial councils and their role in facilitating greater judicial control of court administration in Australia and other countries. The article scrutinises the arguments in favour of greater judicial control of court administration, before moving on to examine the traditional policy challenges of judge-controlled court systems, such as to develop an effective system of administrative accountability that does not undermine judicial independence and to devise an institutional framework for a judicial council and courts that is effective, relevant and accountable. The article argues that the transfer of responsibility for court administration from the executive government to an independent judicial council has the potential not only to safeguard judicial independence, but also to improve court performance, achieve greater customer focus in the court system and bring about an institutional renewal of the judiciary as a whole. It is argued that the introduction of formal and transparent administrative hierarchies within the judiciary is both justified and necessary in order to improve court performance, enhance the social legitimacy of the courts and reinforce judicial independence. The final part of the article outlines the basic institutional contours of a modern judicial council that can assist the courts achieve these goals and respond to the challenges of modern court environment.

The Danish Supreme Court’s Ajos judgment (Dansk Industri) : Rejecting a Consistent Interpretation and Challenging the Effect of a General Principle of EU Law in the Danish Legal Order

Abstract: The Danish Supreme Court rejects a consistent interpretation of national law. This outcome is not beyond dispute, but is not clearly in violation with the court’s EU law obligations. It also refuses to disapply the incompatible national provision on the basis of the general principle of EU law prohibiting discrimination on grounds of age. Thereby the ECJ’s preliminary ruling in the case is disregarded and the Danish Supreme Court’s reasoning is problematic from the perspective of EU law.