Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract: Author(s): Orfield, Gary | Abstract: Almost a half century after the US Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and "inherently unequal," new statistics from the 1998-99 school year show that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s, a period in which there were three major Supreme Court decisions authorizing a return to segregated neighborhood schools and limiting the reach and duration of desegregation orders The data from the 2000 Census and from national school statistics show that the US is an overwhelmingly metropolitan society, dominated by its suburbs The high level of suburban segregation reported for African American and Latino students in this report suggests that a major set of challenges to the future of the minority middle class and to the integration of suburbia need to be addressed

Abstract: Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

Abstract: Although normative questions about the role of the Supreme Court as a countermajoritarian institution have long excited controversy in democratic theory, empirical questions about how far the Court acts contrary to majoritarian opinion have received less attention. Time series analyses for the period 1956–89 indicate the existence of a reciprocal and positive relationship between long-term trends in aggregate public opinion and the Court's collective decisions. The Court's ideological composition changes in response to previous shifts in the partisan and ideological orientation of the president and Congress. The Court also responds to public opinion at the margins even in the absence of membership change. Since 1981, the relationship has vanished or turned negative in direction. The Court's ideological balance has been upset by an unbroken string of conservative-to-moderate appointments, thereby undermining the dynamics that promote judicial responsiveness and raising questions about the majoritarianism of the contemporary and future Court.

Abstract: election years and find that information on news pages is slanted in favor of the candidate endorsed on the newspaper's editorial page. We find that the coverage of incumbent Senators is most affected by the newspaper's endorsement decision. We explore the consequences of "slanted" news coverage by showing that voters evaluate endorsed candidates more favorably than candidates who fail to secure an editorial endorsement. The impact of the endorsement decision on voters' evaluations is most powerful in races receiving a great deal of press attention and among citizens who read their local newspaper on a daily basis. he First Amendment and scores of Supreme Court decisions accord newspapers broad leeway about what information to print concerning politics. Not surprisingly, with so few restrictions, the press has remade itself several times during the last 250

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: Why Statutory Interpretation Is Worth a Book I: The Practice of Dynamic Statutory Interpretation 1. The Insufficiency of Statutory Archaeology 2. The Dynamics of Statutory Interpretation 3. A Case Study: Labor Injunction Decisions, 1877-1938 II: Jurisprudential Theories for Reading Statutes Dynamically 4. Liberal Theories 5. Legal Process Theories 6. Normativist Theories III: Doctrinal Implications of Dynamic Statutory Jurisprudence 7. Legislative History Values 8. Vertical versus Horizontal Coherence 9. Canons of Statutory Construction as Interpretive Regimes Appendix 1 The Primary Legislative Inaction Precedents, 1962-1992 Appendix 2 Supreme Court Decisions Overruling Statutory Precedents, 1962-1992 Appendix 3 The Rehnquist Court's Canons of Statutory Construction Notes Index