Majority opinion

About: Majority opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54845 citations. The topic is also known as: opinion of the court.

The International Criminal Court: a American view

Abstract: The international community has been chastened by the recent record of brutal civil wars. Violation of humanitarian standards has become a tactic of war. The attempt to strengthen enforcement of the law of war through a permanent international criminal court is thus a signal event. The negotiations conducted in Rome in 1998 did not solve all the difficulties that attend a permanent court. These include the problem of amnesties in democratic transitions, the necessary role of the Security Council in UN security architecture, the conflict between broad jurisdiction and developing the law, the role of consent as a treaty principle and third party jurisdiction, the handling of treaty amendments, and the inclusion of 'aggression' as a crime with no agreement on its definition. The necessary role of the United States in providing effective enforcement of ICC judgments warrants continued negotiation to overcome these differences.

Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract: Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion-writing process, and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We test these competing models with data on Supreme Court decision-making during the Burger Court (1969-1986). While we find substantial evidence for both models, the agenda control model gains greater support. This suggests that opinions on the Court on each case are driven, in general, by the interaction of three key variables: the policy preferences of the majority opinion author, the policy preferences of the median justice, and the location of the legal status quo.

Divisions of Opinion Among Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court, 1939–1941.

Abstract: “We are under a Constitution,” said Charles Evans Hughes when he was governor of New York, “but the Constitution is what the judges say it is …” Several theories of jurisprudence have arisen which attempt to take into account this personal element in the judicial interpretation and making of law. The so-called “realistic” school has argued that law is simply the behavior of the judge, that law is secreted by judges as pearls are secreted by oysters. A less extreme position was taken by the late Justice Holmes, who said: “What I mean by law is nothing more or less than the prediction of what a court will do.” While these views go rather far in eliminating any idea of law as a “normative, conceptual system of rules,” no one doubts that many judicial determinations are made on some basis other than the application of settled rules to the facts, or that justices of the United States Supreme Court, in deciding controversial cases involving important issues of public policy, are influenced by biases and philosophies of government, by “inarticulate major premises,” which to a large degree predetermine the position they will take on a given question. Private attitudes, in other words, become public law.

The international court of justice

Abstract: Finds that the Republic of Uganda, by engaging in military activities against the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the latter’s territory, by occupying Ituri and by actively extending military, logistic, economic and financial support to irregular forces having operated on the territory of the DRC, violated the principle of non-use of force in international relations and the principle of non-intervention;