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Supreme court

About: Supreme court is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41858 publications have been published within this topic receiving 306787 citations. The topic is also known as: court of last resort & highest court of appeal.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In 2008, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case related to the discriminatory effects of voter-identification laws in the state of Indiana as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: On January 8, 2008, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case related to the discriminatory effects of voter-identification laws in the state of Indiana. Indiana has one of the most stringent voting requirements in the nation, as voters are required to present an up-to-date photo identification issued by the federal or state government in order to cast a ballot. Plaintiffs argued that the Indiana requirements prevent significant and unequal obstacles to the right to vote. The state argued that Indiana had the right to enforce strict requirements to prevent fraud and uphold confidence in the electoral process. Similar laws have also been proposed in many other states, typically related to charges of vote fraud, and often times tied into the divisive debate regarding undocumented immigrants or African American felons. Therefore the recent decision of the Court has tremendous implications to the future of photo-identification laws across the United States.

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The United States district court system has a large and continuing area of original jurisdiction as mentioned in this paper, which has important consequences for the operation of the American political process, including the ability of federal judges to decide thousands of cases each year and hold court in every state in the union.
Abstract: A MONG THOSE NATIONS with federal arrangements of political power, the United States is one of the few maintaining a national judiciary through the states.' Unlike other federal systems where federal judges adjudicate only at the appellate level, United States district judges have a large and continuing area of original jurisdiction. They decide thousands of cases each year and hold court in every state in the union. The widespread location of a federal judicial power has important consequences for the operation of the American political process. In the first place, an important institution embodying national power is added to the political process at the state level. District courts initiate policy, they implement or may overrule policy made elsewhere in the political system. Further, political interests and factions in the several states may make political demands upon the federal courts as well as on federal legislators and administrators and all members of the state political system. Estimating their probable success, interested parties may choose to make claims in the first instance before the federal courts, or they may turn there as a last resort if efforts elsewhere in the political system have been unsuccessful. Despite its importance, we have little information concerning the political activities of the federal district courts. Although increasingly interested in the political functions of courts, political scientists have been more fascinated by the spectacular activities of the Supreme Court which they have studied in some detail. More studies of the basic federal judicial activities would increase our knowledge of the political functions of the courts and of the nature of the American political system. An excellent opportunity to study the district courts may be found in the quantity of race relations cases which have occurred

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the problem of aggregating judicial preferences over rules in a meaningful way and show that even mildly complex preferences often cannot be combined to form a rational group preference, such that there is no policy that can be said to represent the majority.
Abstract: Ultimate power over legal policy in the United States lies mainly in appellate courts, particularly the Supreme Court. These courts do not and could not hear all cases themselves. Rather, appellate courts make policy by laying down rules for disposing of cases, rules that the lower court judges who hear the vast majority of cases are to apply in their decisions. The problem is that, in the United States and many other countries, appellate courts are multimember, or collegial. The individual judges that compose such courts often differ in their policy goals, which is to say that they might prefer different case outcomes and different rules for disposing of cases. This raises the problem of whether judicial preferences over rules can be aggregated in a meaningful way. A lone judge could issue a rule to tell lower courts how to decide cases her way, but can a collegial court do the same? Can a collegial court operating under majority rule construct a coherent legal doctrine? The answer is far from obvious— –social choice theory shows that even mildly complex preferences often cannot be combined to form a rational group preference, such that there is no policy that can be said to represent “the” majority. In short, we lack a theory as to how preferences that take the form of legal rules can be aggregated, even though this is a foundational issue for the study of judicial policy making. In this paper, I ask whether and how judges on a collegial court can aggregate their preferred rules. I contend that there is a meaningful way to construct a collegial rule, one that reflects differences among individual judges, but still captures their preferences in a majoritarian fashion. I also consider the implications of collegiality and how it affects the structure and content of legal rules. That is, can collegial rules fulfill the same

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Goldman et al. as mentioned in this paper found that a substantial proportion of the outcomes in unanimous decisions in both periods were found to reflect the ideological preferences of the panel majority, and that criminal appeals and the unanimous reversals of decisions in cases raising economic issues were the types of cases in which unanimous decisions were most likely to be consistent with the ideology of the court majority.
Abstract: to divided decisions. Unanimous decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals from two time periods separated by three decades were studied. Contrary to the widespread expectation that most unanimous decisions were truly consensual decisions whose outcomes were determined by precedent or other institutional/role restraints, a substantial proportion of the outcomes in unanimous decisions in both periods were found to reflect the ideological preferences of the panel majority. Criminal appeals and the unanimous reversals of decisions in cases raising economic issues were the types of cases in which unanimous decisions were most likely to be consistent with the ideology of the court majority. Following the pioneering work of Herman Pritchett (1941, 1948), a whole generation of students of judicial decision making has focused on the votes (rather than the opinions) of judges while developing increasingly sophisticated methods of quantitative analysis. With few exceptions, modern students of appellate courts have limited these analyses to nonunanimous decisions. This limitation is usually based on Pritchett's assumption that some cases present the judge with "choice situations sufficient to alter the outcomes while other cases do not" (Goldman, 1969, p. 217). If this assumption is accepted, one must then ask how one knows which cases present reasonable decisional alternatives. The answer supplied by the Pritchett model is that dissent may be taken as an objective indicator that legitimate alternatives were open to the judges. Consensus, on the other hand, is thought to indicate the absence of a real choice situation. The reasons for the exclusion of unanimous decisions in the analysis even of courts with much lower dissent rates than those found on the Supreme Court are spelled out most clearly by Sheldon Goldman. In studies of the U.S. courts of appeals Goldman's model suggests that "in general a consensually decided case indicates that 'objectively' the case situation (either because of clear-cut precedent, or the straight-forward

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Holmes was made a Progressive lion upon his pithy dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision to overturn a New York statute restricting (male) bakers' working hours.
Abstract: Oliver Wendell Holmes was made a Progressive lion upon his pithy dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn a New York statute restricting (male) bakers’working hours. “The 14thAmendment,” said Holmes famously, “does not enact the Social Statics of Mr. Herbert Spencer.”1 Twenty-two years later, in another well-known case, Holmes wrote for the majority, which upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law proposing involuntary sterilization of persons believed to be mentally retarded—the “feebleminded,” in the jargon of the day. “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell (1927). “Three generations of imbeciles,” Holmes volunteered, “is enough.” How does an opponent of Spencerian Social Darwinism come to endorse coercive sterilization of the unfit? This essay argues that, as a matter of history, there is no contradiction in the views that underwrite the

79 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20231,077
20222,410
2021599
20201,063
20191,149
20181,225