Showing papers on "Supreme court published in 2017"

From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown V. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma

Abstract: On its fiftieth anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education no longer enjoys the unbridled admiration it once earned from academic commentators. Early on, the conventional wisdom was that the courageous social engineers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDEF), whose inventive lawyering brought the case to fruition, had caused a social revolution. Legal academics and lawyers still widely acclaim the Brown decision as one of the most important Supreme Court cases in the twentieth century, if not since the founding of our constitutional republic. Brown's exalted status in the constitutional canon is unimpeachable, yet over time its legacy has become complicated and ambiguous. The fact is that fifty years later, many of the social, political, and economic problems that the legally trained social engineers thought the Court had addressed through Brown are still deeply embedded in our society. Blacks lag behind whites in multiple measures of educational achievement, and within the black community, boys are falling further behind than girls. In addition, the will to support public education from kindergarten through twelfth grade appears to be eroding despite growing awareness of education's importance in a knowledge-based society. In the Boston metropolitan area in 2003, poor people of color were at least three times more likely than poor whites to live in severely distressed, racially stratified urban neighborhoods. Whereas poor, working-class, and middle-income whites often lived together in economically stable suburban communities, black families with incomes above $50,000 were twice as likely as white households earning less than $20,000 to live in neighborhoods with high rates of crime and concentrations of poverty. Even in the so-called liberal North, race still segregates more than class.

Decision-Making in a Democracy : The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker

Abstract: Considered as a political system, democracy is a set of basic procedures for arriving at decisions. To Consider the Supreme Court of the United States Strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution, an institution, that is to say, for arriving at decisions on controversial questions of national policy. Court must choose among controversial alternatives of public policy by appealing to at least some criteria of acceptability on questions of fact and value that cannot be found in or deduced from precedent, statute, and Constitution. It is in this sense that the Court is a national policy-maker, and it is this role that gives rise to the problem of the Court's existence in a political system ordinarily held to be democratic. Justices are typically men who, prior to appointment, have engaged in public life and have committed themselves publicly on the great questions of the day.

The Effect of a Supreme Court Decision Regarding Gay Marriage on Social Norms and Personal Attitudes.

Abstract: We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals' personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when presented as likely, shifted perceived norms and personal attitudes toward increased support for gay marriage and gay people. Next, a five-wave longitudinal time-series study using a sample of 1,063 people found an increase in perceived social norms supporting gay marriage after the ruling but no change in personal attitudes. This pattern was replicated in a separate between-subjects data set. These findings provide the first experimental evidence that an institutional decision can change perceptions of social norms, which have been shown to guide behavior, even when individual opinions are unchanged.

A General Approach for Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States

Abstract: Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time-evolving random forest classifier that leverages unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%. Our performance is consistent with, and improves on the general level of prediction demonstrated by prior work; however, our model is distinctive because it can be applied out-of-sample to the entire past and future of the Court, not a single term. Our results represent an important advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications.

Our Good and Faithful Servant: James Moore Wayne and Georgia Unionism

Abstract: Since the Civil War, historians have tried to understand why eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. What compelled the South to favor disunion over union? While enduring stereotypes perpetuated by the Myth of the Lost Cause cast most southerners of the antebellum era as ardent secessionists, not all southerners favored disunion. In addition, not all states were enthusiastic about the prospects of leaving one Union only to join another. Secession and disunion have helped shape the identity of the imagined South, but many Georgians opposed secession. This dissertation examines the life of U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne (1790-1867), a staunch Unionist from Savannah, Georgia. Wayne remained on the U.S. Supreme Court during the American Civil War, and this study explores why he remained loyal to the Union when his home state joined the Confederacy. Examining the nature of Wayne’s Unionism opens many avenues of inquiry into the nature of Georgia’s attitudes toward union and disunion in the antebellum era. By exploring the political, economic and social dimensions of Georgia Unionism and long opposition to secession, this work will add to the growing list of studies of southern Unionists. INDEX WORDS: James Moore Wayne, Unionism, Disunion, Secession, American South, Savannah, Georgia, Supreme Court of the United States, Civil War, Antebellum Georgia “OUR GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT”: JAMES MOORE WAYNE AND GEORGIA UNIONISM

Predicting the Law Area and Decisions of French Supreme Court Cases

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the application of text classification methods to predict the law area and the decision of cases judged by the French Supreme Court. We also investigate the influence of the time period in which a ruling was made over the textual form of the case description and the extent to which it is necessary to mask the judge’s motivation for a ruling to emulate a real-world test scenario. We report results of 96% f1 score in predicting a case ruling, 90% f1 score in predicting the law area of a case, and 75.9% f1 score in estimating the time span when a ruling has been issued using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained on lexical features.

How Political Signals Affect Public Support for Judicial Nominations: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

Abstract: How do Americans evaluate potential US Supreme Court candidates? Using a novel, two-part conjoint experiment, I show that respondents put high importance on the political leanings of potential Cour...

"Let's get in formation": On becoming a psychologist-activist in the 21st century.

Abstract: Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many social movements that have resulted in an array of historic societal outcomes-ranging from the end of racial segregation to women's voting rights to the legalization of same-sex marriages. Despite the positive outcomes derived from political activism, many psychologists have struggled with how to advocate for social justice while maintaining their professional responsibilities and ethical boundaries. The current article reviews the historical ways that psychologists have participated in political movements-from the use of psychological research in landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases to psychologist-led pushes for policy changes in psychology, medicine, and other mental health related fields. Next, a critical review provides some of the major controversies or dilemmas regarding psychology, social justice, and political participation-including (a) ethical concerns and professional boundaries, (b) the utility of political neutrality in psychology, (c) psychologists' balance and self-care, (d) psychologists' lack of advocacy training, and (e) beliefs concerning the role of social justice advocacy in psychology. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the concept "psychologist-activist"-highlighting the many ways that psychologists across various subfields and institutions can combat oppression on individual, interpersonal, group, and institutional levels. (PsycINFO Database Record

Nomos e narração

Abstract: The seminal article by Robert Cover, Nomos and Narrative , has been the inspiration for several generations of American jurists. Cover writes about the implications between normativity and narrative, trying to explain the role of violence practiced by judges in the performance of their duties. Through biblical sources and the social and legal history of Judaism, court acts are analyzed as what Cover calls “normative universes”, different from those decisions by official institutions. All this intertwined theoretical construction is due to study thoroughly what the author deemed to be the most important decision of the 1982 Supreme Court, the Bob Jones University case, which dealt with the state dismantling of racial segregation in schools and universities, in a context of strong religious resistance by certain communities. (Abstract by translator)

Shouldn't Dead Be Dead?: The Search for a Uniform Definition of Death.

Abstract: In 1968, the definition of death in the United States was expanded to include not just death by cardiopulmonary criteria, but also death by neurologic criteria. We explore the way the definition has been modified by the medical and legal communities over the past 50 years and address the medical, legal and ethical controversies associated with the definition at present, with a particular highlight on the Supreme Court of Nevada Case of Aden Hailu.

1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege

Abstract: INTRODUCTION I. THE CONTEMPORARY ATTACK ON THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE A. The Political Attack B. The Judicial and Academic Attack 1. Separation of Powers 2. Subconstitutional Doctrines and the Separation of Powers 3. Other Constitutional Claims 4. Academic Attacks C. Contemporary Anti-Administrativism's Core Themes 1. Rhetorical Anti-Administrativism 2. The Judicial Turn 3. Constitutionalism and Originalism D. Does Contemporary Anti-Administrativism Matter? II. 1930s Redux I: Twentieth-Century Conservative Resistance to Administrative Government A. The Liberty League and the ABA Special Committee 1. The Liberty League 2. The Special Committee 3. The Entrenchment of the National Administrative State B. The Contemporary Relevance of the League and the Special Committee III. 1930s Redux II: The Administrative State and Executive Power A. The Brownlow Committee and Presidential Administration B. The Administrative State's Constitutional Functions 1. Bureaucratic Supervision and Internal Constraints 2. Effective Governance C. The Administrative State as Constitutionally Obligatory 1. Delegation and Its Implications 2. Delegation and Current Anti-Administrative Challenges CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION Eighty years on, we are seeing a resurgence of the antiregulatory and antigovernment forces that lost the battle of the New Deal. President Trump's administration has proclaimed the "deconstruction of the administrative state" to be one of its main objectives. Early Trump executive actions quickly delivered on this pledge, with a wide array of antiregulatory actions and a budget proposing to slash many agencies' funding. Invoking the long-dormant Congressional Review Act (CRA), the Republican-controlled Congress has eagerly repealed numerous regulations promulgated late in the Obama Administration. Other major legislative and regulatory repeals are pending, and bills that would impose the most significant restrictions on administrative governance since the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was adopted in 1946--like the proposed Regulatory Accountability Act (RAA)--now stand a chance of enactment. This resistance to administrative government reflects antigovernment themes that have been a consistent presence in national politics since President Reagan's election in 1980. But the immediate trigger for the current resurgence of attacks on the administrative state is the national regulatory and administrative expansion that took place under President Obama. Of particular relevance here, an attack on the national administrative state is also evident at the Supreme Court. The anti-administrative voices are fewer on the Court than in the political sphere and often speak in separate opinions, but they are increasingly prominent. (1) Led by Justice Thomas, with Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, and now Justice Gorsuch sounding similar complaints, they have attacked the modern administrative state as a threat to liberty and democracy and suggested that its central features may be unconstitutional. (2) Conservative legal scholars have joined the fray, issuing a number of academic attacks on the constitutionality of the administrative state that conservative jurists then feature prominently in their opinions. (3) These judicial attacks on administrative governance share several key characteristics: they are strong on rhetorical criticism of administrative government out of proportion to their bottom-line results; they oppose administration and bureaucracy, but not greater presidential power; they advocate a greater role for the courts to defend individual liberty against the ever-expanding national state; and they regularly condemn contemporary national government for being at odds with the constitutional structure the Framers created, though rarely--with the marked exception of Justice Thomas--do they develop this originalist argument with any rigor. (4) These features, particularly the strong rhetorical condemnation of administrative government, typify what I call here contemporary anti- administrativism. …

At the Intersection of the Sacred and the Legal: Rights for Nature in Uttarakhand, India

Abstract: In March 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India ruled in the Ganges and Yamuna and the Glaciers cases that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers, as well as other natural objects in the state of Uttarakhand enjoy legal rights. In both cases, the High Court established the natural objects as legal minors and conferred guardianship responsibilities on several individuals within the state government of Uttarakhand. These judgments create novel legal rights for nature and, as such, present powerful examples of the increasing relevance of rights-centred environmental protection. The impact of this case law, however, is uncertain. As a start, the legal rights entrusted to nature are underpinned by such broad definitions of 'harm' that it is difficult to envision successful implementation. Further, the Ganges and Yamuna case is currently stayed pending appeal to the Supreme Court, which may decide to overturn the High Court's findings. Still, these cases are important to analyse, especially in light of how constructing nature as a legal subject/legal person shifts environmental law away from public law and into the sphere of private law. Also, the Ganges and Yamuna case draws explicitly on Hinduism to support the sacred status of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, which, in the current context of the Hindu Nationalist Movement, may prove controversial.

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.

Justice, Interrupted: The Effect of Gender, Ideology and Seniority at Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Abstract: Oral arguments at the Supreme Court are important — they affect case outcomes and constitute the only opportunity for outsiders to directly witness the behavior of the justices of the highest court. This Article studies how the justices compete to have influence at oral argument, by examining the extent to which the Justices interrupt each other; it also scrutinizes how advocates interrupt the Justices, contrary to the rules of the Court. We find that judicial interactions at oral argument are highly gendered, with women being interrupted at disproportionate rates by their male colleagues, as well as by male advocates. Oral argument interruptions are also highly ideological, not only because ideological foes interrupt each other far more than ideological allies do, but we show that conservatives interrupt liberals more frequently than vice versa. Seniority also has some influence on oral arguments, but primarily through the female justices learning over time how to behave more like male justices, avoiding traditionally female linguistic framing in order to reduce the extent to which they are dominated by the men. We use two separate databases to examine how robust these findings are: a publicly available database of Roberts Court oral arguments, and another that we created, providing in-depth analysis of the 1990, 2002, and 2015 Terms. This latter data allows us to see whether the same patterns held when there were one, two, and three female justices on the Court, respectively. These two sets of analyses allow us to show that the effects of gender, ideology, and seniority on interruptions have occurred fairly consistently over time. It also reveals that the increase in interruptions over time is not a product of Justice Scalia’s particularly disruptive style, as some have theorized, nor of the political polarization in the country generally arising from the 1994 Republican Revolution. We also find some evidence that judicial divisions based on legal methodology, as well as ideology, lead to greater interruptions.

Proportionality and Judicial Activism: Fundamental Rights Adjudication in Canada, Germany and South Africa

Abstract: The principle of proportionality is currently one of the most discussed topics in the field of comparative constitutional law. Many critics claim that courts use the proportionality test as an instrument of judicial self-empowerment. Proportionality and Judicial Activism tests this hypothesis empirically; it systematically and comparatively analyses the fundamental rights jurisprudence of the Canadian Supreme Court, the German Federal Constitutional Court and the South African Constitutional Court. The book shows that the proportionality test does give judges a considerable amount of discretion. However, this analytical openness does not necessarily lead to judicial activism. Instead, judges are faced with significant institutional constraints, as a result of which all three examined courts refrain from using proportionality for purposes of judicial activism.

A Formula Goes to Court: Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap

Abstract: Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This note explores some of its mathematical properties in light of the fact that it reduces to a straight proportional comparison of votes to seats. Though we offer several critiques, we assess that EG can still be a useful component of a courtroom analysis. But a famous formula can take on a life of its own and this one will need to be watched closely.

U.S. Case Law and Legal Precedent Affirming the Due Process Rights of Immigrants Fleeing Persecution.

Abstract: The political discourse on domestic immigration policy has shifted rapidly in recent years, mirrored by similar shifts in the geopolitical climate worldwide. However, a nuanced assessment of the legal basis backing such rhetoric is sorely lacking. This article examines the historical, legal, and case law precedent as it pertains specifically to immigrants who are fleeing persecution and residing within the United States. Due process rights emerged from the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Constitutional Amendments and have been expanded to include this population through several sequential United States Supreme Court Cases. We review the 1951 Convention Related to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and examine subsequent case law and legal precedent. We then present evidence documenting widespread violations of due process rights for immigrants fleeing persecution. Specifically, we address the right to a fair hearing for individuals fearing for their lives upon return to their home country, the right against wrongful detainment, and the right to apply for asylum regardless of religion or country of origin. We conclude by addressing potential counterarguments to our thesis, future directions, and the role of forensic psychiatrists.

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.

The next american revolution

Abstract: On the whole, the scholarly literature does not go far enough in its understanding of money in politics and corporate political power — ultimately, the role of concentrated capital in democracy. The rising economic and political inequalities affecting the United States are not properly diagnosed as the excesses of a generally legitimate capitalist democracy in need, merely, of legal reforms. Rather, they are the symptoms of an overarching flaw in our political system that requires a revolution — a revolution of the non-violent, constitutional kind. Action follows understanding. If the understanding of a problem is weak and superficial, the reform agenda will also be weak and superficial. It is true, as the call for papers states, that Supreme Court cases on money in politics “shift power to a new economic royalty.” Rather than an embellishment or exaggeration, however, this is actually the essential starting point for putting today’s plutocracy into its proper historical context, that of despotism, tyranny, and oppression. Highlighting the thoughts of key historical figures, this essay has two purposes: first, to explore how revolutionary understandings can bring modern-day problems of economic and political inequality into sharper focus; and, second, to reveal the essential thrust of an enduring solution, a constitutional amendment to separate business and state.

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.

Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation

Abstract: This groundbreaking book contributes to an emerging literature that examines responses to the rights revolution that unfolded in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Using original archival evidence and data, Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang identify the origins of the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law in the first Reagan Administration. They then measure the counterrevolution's trajectory in the elected branches, court rulemaking, and the Supreme Court, evaluate its success in those different lawmaking sites, and test key elements of their argument. Finally, the authors leverage an institutional perspective to explain a striking variation in their results: although the counterrevolution largely failed in more democratic lawmaking sites, in a long series of cases little noticed by the public, an increasingly conservative and ideologically polarized Supreme Court has transformed federal law, making it less friendly, if not hostile, to the enforcement of rights through lawsuits.

Court Orders, White Flight, and School District Segregation, 1970–2010

Abstract: American public schools experienced a substantial reduction of black-white segregation after the Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of Mississippi schools in 1969. Past research has shown that progress slowed by the 1990s, with some arguing that segregation actually began to rebound. This study is the first to examine enrollment data for each decade between 1970 and 2010 for a comprehensive set of districts across the country and also the first to include data for 1980 for a national sample of districts. It provides definitive evidence that most desegregation occurred in the 1970s, with little subsequent change. It also addresses two questions about the desegregation process. First, how closely was it tied to court orders for a particular school district or for a neighboring district? Desegregation was greatest in response to a legal mandate, but it also extended to districts that never faced court action. Second, what was the effect of mandates on white flight? White student enrollment declined generally in these decades but more in districts that faced a mandate in the immediate past decade. White flight contributed to a modest increase in segregation between school districts, but desegregation within districts was sufficient to result in a large net decline at a metropolitan level.

Opportunity and Overrides: The Effect of Institutional Public Support on Congressional Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions:

Abstract: Existing theories of legislative-judicial relations emphasize the role of public support for the judiciary on the likelihood of legislative compliance Although Congress can strengthen or weaken the Supreme Court’s decisions after initial compliance, the role of public support for the judiciary on subsequent legislative action is unclear We develop a theory of legislative-judicial interactions, which suggests that Congress considers the court’s current level of public support when determining whether to override a Supreme Court decision We test our theory using data on congressional overrides of US Supreme Court decisions, finding that high levels of public support for the court shield the court from hostile congressional action The results underscore the vital role played by the public in interbranch relations, suggesting that public support plays a role in the legacy of a judicial decision beyond ensuring initial compliance

Illegality: A Contemporary Portrait of Immigration

Abstract: On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court decided, by a 4-4 vote, to uphold the decisions of the lower courts, blocking President Obama’s administrative actions on immigration. After years of congressional gridlock, the Obama plan would have bypassed Congress by expanding the 2012 Deferred Action for

‘Bolam’ to ‘Montgomery’ is result of evolutionary change of medical practice towards ‘patient-centred care’

Abstract: The Supreme Court judgement in 'Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board' has caused a change in the law concerning the duty of doctors on disclosure of information to patients regarding risks. The law now requires a doctor to take reasonable care to ensure that the patient is aware of any material risks involved in any recommended treatment, and of any reasonable alternative or variant treatments. Are doctors totally removed from the protective shield even if the practice is accepted by a reasonable body of medical opinion previously laid down by 'Bolam' with the recent Supreme Court decision in the 'Montgomery' case? This paper questions whether the 'Bolam' principle needs to be discarded or re-interpreted in the modern context of health care. Adopting 'patient-centred' care to unfold the 'significant risks' attached to patients would align with the evolving changes in medical law. It should be the changing context of health care driving the evolving change of law.

Reforming Youth Incarceration in the United States

Abstract: The Supreme Court provides legal precedent and moral leadership that juvenile justice advocates can leverage. The three proposals outlines—returning to a default rule of keeping kids in juvenile court, abolishing mandatory minimum sentences for kids, and overhauling youth incarceration—are all good starting points for correcting the course of American juvenile justice. The Supreme Court's decisions in the Miller trilogy were about much more than LWOP for kids. The Miller Court, in particular, made clear that its opinion was an indictment of broader juvenile justice practices, such as transfer laws that permit children to be tried in adult court and sentencing guidelines that render youth irrelevant. When the juvenile court system was created, it was difficult and rare for a child to be transferred out of that system and into the adult court system. Though, transfer provisions that put kids in adult court are the norm.

Fighting within the bar: Judge Elreta Alexander and civil rights advocacy in Greensboro, North Carolina

Abstract: Elreta Melton Alexander (1919–1998) was a pioneering African-American attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina. Coming of age during the Jim Crow period of the South, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, and grew up in a black middle class community. The descendant of two white grandparents, her bi-racialism formed her early awareness of colorism within the African-American community. Alexander received her Bachelor of Arts from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University before going on to become the first African-American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School in 1945. In 1947, she became the first African-American woman to be admitted to the North Carolina bar. Her husband, Dr. Girardeau “Tony” Alexander was a prominent surgeon at L. Richardson Hospital, the segregated hospital for African Americans in Greensboro. Their marriage, which lasted thirty years, was often troubled, with domestic violence, infidelity, and alcoholism, ending in divorce in 1968. After establishing her practice in Greensboro, Alexander became a successful attorney. In 1964, she defended Charles Yoes, who stood with three other men accused of raping a white woman, Mary Lou Marion. The trial went on to become the longest criminal trial in Guilford County court history at the time, and changed the county’s jury selection procedures. In 1968, Alexander became the first African-American woman to become an elected district court judge. During her tenure she created the controversial Judgment Day program, aimed at rehabilitating young, first-time offenders. In 1974, Alexander ran for North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice, losing in the Republican primary to James Newcomb, a white, fire-extinguisher salesman. Newcomb went on to lose to Democrat Susie Sharp, who became the first elected female state Supreme Court chief justice in the country. Alexander’s loss prompted changes to North Carolina judicial election requirements. Through it all, Alexander remained devoted to her only son, Girardeau, III, who suffered from schizophrenia. While not a well-known figure in the Civil Rights Movement, this dissertation offers a new perspective on civil rights leadership. Alexander was more than a judge to those she interacted with; she was also a teacher who integrated her commitment to civil rights in everything she did. As Alexander said, “Every case to me was a civil rights case.” This work contends Alexander dedicated her career to civil rights and challenging the status quo of the segregationist South through performative leadership and using her professional standing to advocate for marginalized individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system.

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

How the Criminalization of Pregnancy Robs Women of Reproductive Autonomy.

Abstract: In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty-two for committing "homicide by child abuse." She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and justice, McKnight's conviction inspired similar prosecutions of other poor black women and then of other women. More than one-third of states consider pregnant women's illicit drug use a form of child abuse, resulting in unprecedented forms of criminal and civil punishment. Laws previously understood to protect pregnant women from domestic violence during pregnancy, such as fetal protection laws, now serve as the vehicles for prosecuting pregnant women. What these prosecutions and laws expose are the multitudinous ways in which the criminalization of poor pregnant women-and normalization of that criminalization, such that even doctors and nurses are expected to participate in it-serve to humiliate women, interfere with their reproductive health, and ultimately rob women of reproductive autonomy.