Supreme Court Decisions

About: Supreme Court Decisions is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1804 publications have been published within this topic receiving 17066 citations.

Mayo’s impact on patent applications related to biotechnology, diagnostics and personalized medicine

Abstract: On the sixth anniversary of Mayo v. Prometheus, what impact has the US Supreme Court decision had on patent subject-matter eligibility and the prosecution of biotech-related patent applications before the US Patent and Trademark Office?

Texas v United States: The Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional and Will Remain So.

Abstract: On December 14, 2018, in a widely reported decision, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional. The judge reasoned that since the ACA’s “individual mandate” is unconstitutional, the rest of the law cannot stand without it. However, the ACA will remain in place pending appeal, and it is highly unlikely that this ruling will stand.

First Amendment Limits on Library Collection Management

Abstract: First Amendment freedoms impose some limits on publicly funded libraries’ discretion to manage their collections, but identifying those limits is difficult. The First Amendment law of libraries is murky territory, defined by three Supreme Court decisions that failed to produce majority opinions and lower court opinions that have employed a variety of doctrinal approaches. Libraries nonetheless must make sense of these cases to create and implement collection development and Internet access policies and procedures. This article surveys and analyzes the First Amendment law of library collections and finds that libraries’ discretion is broad, but certain limitations apply. These can serve as a reminder to librarians of their ethical commitment to challenge censorship and provide access to all points of view.

Public Perceptions of Judicial Unanimity and Dissent: The Impact of Divided Court Decisions on the Mass Media and Public Opinion

Abstract: Do judicial dissents affect mass politics? Many people, including judges, scholars, political commentators, and public officials claim that they do. The conventional wisdom is that unanimous rulings boost support for court decisions, while judicial division fuels popular opposition. As such, it has been suggested that courts present a united front on controversial cases as a strategy for garnering support and quelling resistance. However, empirical analysis of the public perception of judicial unanimity and dissent is sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent.This dissertation is broadly guided by the question of whether unity/division among judges can in fact influence media coverage of and popular attitudes toward court decisions. In doing so, I consider both the role of the news media as an intermediary between the courts and the public and direct public reaction to information about court unity. Using a combination of existing and original data, I analyze newspaper coverage patterns to determine if judicial consensus has an independent effect on the visibility and favorability of Supreme Court coverage. While previous work has assumed that the correlation between coverage and division is the result of the most newsworthy cases producing the most divided outcomes, I find that dissent on the Supreme Court generates press coverage independent of other factors associated with a case's newsworthiness. Moreover, this dissertation is the first study to find that narrower Supreme Court majorities attract more critical coverage. In addition, using a series of original survey experiments from a nationally representative sample, I expand and improve upon existing research of the direct popular reaction to judicial unanimity and dissent. Though most previous work on this subject had found no link between judicial consensus and public opinion, recently published findings have suggested that unanimity does indeed boost agreement with Supreme Court decisions across a variety of issue areas. Breaking with this, I find that popular reaction to judicial consensus is highly dependent on the ideological salience of the issue involved and that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, dissent can actually foster acceptance of rulings among the Court's opponents by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. However, this effect of majority size on public opinion appears limited to the Supreme Court: I find no evidence of a similar effect at the lower court level.This dissertation improves upon the existing body of knowledge regarding the judiciary's role in the political world. Not only does it reveal potential evidence of a news media bias toward judicial conflict, its public opinion findings buck both the conventional wisdom and the extant literature. Rather than suggesting that unanimity generally leads to a more supportive populace, as the conventional wisdom argues, or that there is no connection at all, as much of the scholarly literature claims, my findings show that the relationship between judicial consensus is more nuanced and is frequently the opposite of what the conventional wisdom suggests.

Words are Enough: The Troublesome Use of Photographs, Maps, and Other Images in Supreme Court Opinions

Abstract: In this Commentary, Mr. Dellinger defines and analyses a heretofore unrecognized class of United States Supreme Court decisions: those in which a photograph, map, replica, or reproduction is attached to a Justice's opinion. Such attachments, all relying on visual or sight-based attributes that uniquely differentiate them from words, have appeared in a number of seminal decisions. Mr. Dellinger argues that the use of such attachments poses special dangers: because their neutrality and accuracy are so readily assumed, such attachments often elude the skepticism with which the written positions of Court opinions are generally reviewed. yet their inherent distortions and vulnerability to manipulation make the Justices' reliance on them problematic. Mr. Dellinger then argues that the Court should forgo any future reliance on attachments. In the alternative, the Justices, the companies that reproduce Court opinions, and readers must improve significantly the ways in which they respectively use, publish, and review these attachments.