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.

Race, income, and perceptions of the U.S. court system.

Abstract: This article reports on the effect of income within race on African Americans' perception of the courts. Our findings are somewhat consistent with the previous research on black middle-class relative dissatisfaction with various American institutions. That is, unlike whites and Latirios in our study, we find that higher-income African Americans are more skeptical of the notion that blacks receive equal treatment in the courts. This same group also reported less confidence in the court's handling of specific types of cases (e.g., civil, criminal and juvenile delinquency cases.) However, better off blacks were more likely than poor blacks to have confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court and community courts. These findings point a more complex account of African American perceptions of the courts, an account that draws a distinction between diffused and specific support of the courts.

Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment

Abstract: LL.B. 1966, Yale Law School. Member of the California, District of Columbia, Missouri and United States Supreme Court Bars. Partner, Benenson, Kates and Hardy (San Francisco office). Of counsel, O'Brien & Hallisey, San Francisco, California. Mr. Kates authored one of the petitions for certiorari in Quilici v. City of Morton Grove. — Ed. The author wishes to thank the following for their assistance: Professors William Van Alstyne (Law, Duke University Law School), Roy Wortman (History, Kenyon College), and Stephen Halbrook (Philosophy, George Mason University); Dr. Joyce Malcolm (Law Fellow, Harvard Law School), Dr. David I. Caplan, Mr. Willis Hannawalt (Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, San Francisco), and Mr. David Hardy (Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Interior Department, Washington, D.C.). Of course, the responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation is the author's alone. 1 Such legislation could, for example, take the form of a restrictive permit requirement designed and administered to exclude more than 99% of the civilian population from handgun ownership. On the constitutionality of restrictive permit systems, see notes 253-54 infra and accompanying text. 2 See J. ALVIANI & W. DRAKE, HANDGUN CONTROL: ISSUES AND ALTERNATIVES 48-54 (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1975) (quoting resolutions to that effect from: The Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church, Common Cause, National Alliance for Safer Cities, Union of America Hebrew Congregations and Unitarian Universalist Association). [Copyright © 1983 Michigan Law Review. Originally published as 82 MICH. L. REV. 204-273 (1983). For educational use only. The printed edition remains canonical. For citational use please obtain a back issue from William S. Hein & Co., 1285 Main Street, Buffalo, New York 14209; 716-882-2600 or 800-828-7571.]

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

Abstract: Building upon developments in theoretical and applied machine learning, as well as the efforts of various scholars including Guimera and Sales-Pardo (2011), Ruger et al. (2004), and Martin et al. (2004), we construct a model designed to predict the voting behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. Using the extremely randomized tree method first proposed in Geurts, et al. (2006), a method similar to the random forest approach developed in Breiman (2001), as well as novel feature engineering, we predict more than sixty years of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States (1953-2013). Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7% of the Court's overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes. Our performance is consistent with the general level of prediction offered by prior scholars. However, our model is distinctive as it is the first robust, generalized, and fully predictive model of Supreme Court voting behavior offered to date. Our model predicts six decades of behavior of thirty Justices appointed by thirteen Presidents. With a more sound methodological foundation, our results represent a major advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications, such as those described in Katz (2013).

A Preliminary Approach to the Multilabel Classification Problem of Portuguese Juridical Documents

Abstract: Portuguese juridical documents from Supreme Courts and the Attorney General’s Office are manually classified by juridical experts into a set of classes belonging to a taxonomy of concepts.

American Balancing and German Proportionality: The Historical Origins

Abstract: American and European constitutional systems have two similar doctrines: balancing and proportionality. Both resemble each other in important aspects and are often discussed in tandem. However, balancing has never attained the status of an established doctrine in American constitutional law in the same way that proportionality has in European constitutional law. Moreover, balancing has always been the subject of fierce criticism and is very much a controversial concept in American constitutional law. European proponents of proportionality are perplexed by this American resistance which is sometimes viewed as based on American isolationalism and unilateralism. In this article we suggest an original, and often overlooked, explanation to the difference between balancing and proportionality - the historical origins of the two concepts. We examine the ways in which proportionality developed in Germany and balancing in the United States and show that the origins of both concepts were very different. For instance, proportionality was originally developed in administrative law, and was only tangentially (if at all) related to private law, whereas balancing arose in private law and was only later extended to public law; proportionality was created as part of an attempt to protect individual rights, whereas balancing was created for the exact opposite purpose - to check overzealous protection of rights by the Supreme Court during the Lochner era. We suggest that these differences may go a long way in explaining current disparities in attitudes and current barriers to dialogue and convergence between these two concepts.