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.

Delaying Justice: The Supreme Court’s Decision to Hear Rearguments

Abstract: Some of the Supreme Court’s most famous cases—from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—have been decided only after being held over and argued a second time. While few cases ta...

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

The Origins of Judicial Review Revisited,or How the Marshall Court MadeMore out of Less

Abstract: Alexander Hamilton called the judiciary the "weakest branch" of the three branches of government,1 but today we know better. To us not only does the unelected, life-tenured federal judiciary seem remarkably strong, but at times it actually seems bolder and more capable than the two elective branches in setting social policy. Certainly the federal judges, and especially the Justices of the Supreme Court, precisely because they do not have periodically to face an electorate, exercise an extraordinary degree of authority over our society and culture. The Supreme Court not only sets aside laws that popularly elected legislatures pass, but also interprets and construes the law with a freedom that sometimes is virtually legislative in scope. But it is not just the Supreme Court and other federal courts that are so powerful. Even the state courts, many of which are elected periodically, are extremely influential. Indeed, as Charles Ingersall pointed out as early as 1826, no where else in the modem world do courts wield as much power in shaping the contours of life as do the American courts.2 We have usually given the name "judicial review" to this sweeping judicial authority. But if by judicial review we mean only the power of the Supreme Court and of other courts to set aside legislative acts in violation of the Constitution, then the term is too narrow, for voiding legislation is only the most prominent part of a broader manipulative power that courts exercise over wide areas of American life. Commentators often have given the major responsibility for creating this power of judicial review to John Marshall, the great Chief Justice of the United States who served from 1801 to 1835. Marshall, nearly everyone acknowledges, was the greatest Chief Justice in American history. During his long career as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which spanned the administrations of five presidents, he helped to lay the foundations for both the Supreme Court's eventual independence and the constitutional supremacy of the national government over the states. But more important, at a stroke, his decision in Marbury v. Madison3 was supposed to have created the practice of judicial review. Even a constitutional scholar as sophisticated as Alexander M. Bickel thought that Marshall had done it all. "If any social process can be said to have been 'done' at a given time and by a given act," Bickel wrote in 1962, "it is Marshall's achievement. The time was 1803; the act was the decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison."4 Perhaps this is the way that many lawyers and jurists prefer to explain things. Perhaps they like to ransack the past in order to discover specific moments or concrete precedents, usually court decisions, which created important subsequent judicial practices and processes. The problem with this jurisprudential and unhistorical way of thinking is that it leaves its practitioners vulnerable to critics who can find other, more important precedents and moments in accounting for a practice or process. This has been the case recently with Marshall and judicial review. A number of revisionist legal scholars, including Christopher Wolfe, J. M. Sosin, and Robert Lowry Clinton, have argued that Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison or elsewhere, did not create the modern practice of judicial review.5 These revisionist scholars contend that the origins of judicial review can best be located in the years following the Marshall Court, in the post CivilWar era at the end of the nineteenth century. In these years, revisionist scholars argue, the modem image of the greatness of the Marshall Court was elaborated and expanded, culminating in Albert J. Beverage's monumental four-volume Lofe of John marshall.6 Not until the late nineteenth century did the Supreme Court cite the Marbury decision as a precedent for judicial review, and only in 1910 did the distinguished historian of the judiciary Edward Corwin actually com the term "judicial review. …

How judges think in the Brazilian Supreme Court: Estimating ideal points and identifying dimensions

Abstract: We use NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) (Poole and Rosenthal, 1983, 1997) to estimate ideal points for all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012. Based on these estimated preferences we identify the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in this Court. These estimates correctly predict over 95% of the votes on constitutional review cases in each of the compositions of the Court which we analyze. The main contribution of the paper is to identify that the main dimension along which preferences align in the Brazilian Supreme Court is for and against the economic interest of the Executive. This is significantly different than the conservative-liberal polarization of the US Supreme Court. Our estimates show that along this dimension the composition of the Court has been clearly favorable to the Executive's economic interests, providing the setting in which the dramatic transformation in institutions and policies that the country has undergone in last two decades could take place.