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.

Symposium on Mergers and Antitrust

Abstract: M ^ X ergers and acquisitions spark ongoing controversy in the economics profession and in society at large. This is not surprising. Billion dollar deals not only involve a great deal of money, but they often raise economic issues implicating capital and labor markets as well as the markets for the products sold by the merger partners. Because of this, merger enforcement is probably the most widely known area of antitrust. However, economists who do not specialize in industrial organization generally have little understanding of the type of competitive analysis that forms the basis for merger enforcement by the antitrust authorities and the courts. This is unfortunate. Not only does this analysis have important social implications, but when formulated rigorously, the analytic model used in antitrust represents a simple, yet quite sophisticated, microeconomic model of competition. In the past ten years, economics and economists have become far more important in antitrust. The so-called "Chicago school" of antitrust has provided the intellectual rationale for a considerable loosening of antitrust law. Its intellectual leaders, for example, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and Frank Easterbrook, have become judges and soon may ascend to (or already have joined) the Supreme Court. Economists like James Miller and George Douglas have become Federal Trade Commissioners, and the staff economists at the Commission and the Department of Justice have gained considerable influence.

Trial and Error: The Supreme Court's Philosophy of Science

Abstract: In Frye (1923) the D.C. Court upheld the exclusion of testimony of the results of a then-new blood-pressure deception test on the grounds that novel scientific testimony crosses the line between the experimental and the demonstrable, and so is admissible, only if it is sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field to which it belongs. Ignored for a decade, rarely cited for a quarter-century, over time the Frye test became increasingly influential, until by the early 1980s it had been adopted by 29 states. In 1975, however, newly-enacted Federal Rules of Evidence had set a seemingly less restrictive standard: the testimony of a qualified expert, including a scientific expert, is admissible provided it is relevant (unless it is excluded, under Rule 403, on grounds of unfair prejudice, waste of time, or confusing or misleading the jury). In 1992 proposals to tighten up the Federal Rules were before Congress. In 1993 the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Daubert -- the first case in its 204-year history where the central questions concerned the admissibility of scientific testimony. The Frye rule arose in a criminal case, and had for most of its history been cited in criminal cases; but Daubert was a tort action in which the trial court had relied on Frye in excluding the plaintiffs' experts' testimony that the morning-sickness drug Bendectin was teratogenic. So the Supreme Court was to determine whether the FRE had superseded Frye, and in particular how Rule 702 was to be interpreted. Yes, Justice Blackmun wrote for the majority, the FRE had superseded Frye; but the Rules themselves require judges to screen proffered expert testimony not only for relevance, but also for reliability. In dissent, however, pointing out that the word reliable nowhere occurs in the text of Rule 702, Justice Rehnquist anticipated difficulties over whether and if so how Daubert should be applied to non-scientific expert testimony; worried aloud that federal judges were being asked to become amateur scientists; and questioned the wisdom of his colleagues' readiness to get involved in philosophy of science. I think he was right to suspect that something was seriously amiss; in fact, what I shall have to say here might be read as an exploration, amplification, and partial defense of his reservations about that philosophical excursus.

Fatal in Theory and Strict in Fact: An Empirical Analysis of Strict Scrutiny in the Federal Courts

Abstract: A popular myth in American constitutional law is that the strict scrutiny standard of review applied to enforce rights such as free speech and equal protection is, in the famous words of Gerald Gunther, 'strict' in theory and fatal in fact In recent years, however, this traditional understanding of strict scrutiny's inevitable deadliness has been challenged in high-profile cases such as Adarand Constructors v Pena, where the Supreme Court expressed the wish to dispel the notion that strict scrutiny is 'strict' in theory, but fatal in fact, and Grutter v Bollinger, where the Court turned wish into action and upheld an affirmative action policy under strict scrutiny According to the Court in Grutter, when applying strict scrutiny, [c]ontext matters This Article offers a systematic empirical study of strict scrutiny in the federal courts Reporting the results of a census of every strict scrutiny decision published by the district, circuit, and Supreme courts between 1990 and 2003, this study shows that strict scrutiny is far from the inevitably deadly test imagined by the Gunther myth and more closely resembles the context-sensitive tool described by O'Connor Overall, 30% of all applications of strict scrutiny - nearly one in three - result in the challenged law being upheld Rather than fatal in fact, strict scrutiny is survivable in fact, and is so across constitutional doctrine: 27% of suspect classifications, 22% of free speech restrictions, 24% of fundamental rights infringements, 33% of freedom of association burdens, and 59% of religious liberty burdens adjudicated under strict scrutiny survive Employing logistic regression, this Article shows that this high survival rate for a supposedly fatal standard of review is context-sensitive Although political ideology and regional variation are found to have no significant impact on voting in strict scrutiny cases, courts are strongly influenced by the identity of the governmental actor Most prominently, laws adopted by the federal government are far more likely to survive (50%) than those adopted by state (29%) or local (17%) governments Surprisingly, however, strict scrutiny has become more fatal in the years since Adarand declared the standard to be survivable (from 40% in the early 1990s to 20% in the early 2000s) I also offer an in-depth look at strict scrutiny cases within each area of law where that standard is found, showing which types of laws are more likely to be upheld than others even within discrete doctrines

The Law and Social Science of Stop and Frisk

Abstract: In 1968, almost 50 years ago, the Supreme Court validated, in a case called Terry v. Ohio (1968), a common police practice known as stop and frisk, so long as an officer could justify the action on the basis of a newly developed standard: reasonable suspicion. Today, policing agencies use stop and frisk prophylactically, stopping in some cities tens or even hundreds of thousands of people annually. These developments and the litigation around the strategy in New York City and elsewhere provide an opportunity to revisit Terry and to consider recent research in law and social science regarding stop and frisk. This review focuses on three issues: the evolution of legal doctrine pertaining to stop and frisk, arguments regarding the effectiveness of stop and frisk as a mechanism to control and reduce crime, and a delineation of the relevance of the theory of procedural justice to our understanding of the interleaving of the law and social science of stop and frisk.