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.

Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative

Abstract: At the height of the McCarthy era, when Congressional committees were exposing "communist infiltration" in many areas of American life, the Supreme Court was upholding loyalty oath requirements, and the executive branch was ferreting out alleged communists in government, the U.S. Attorney General filed a pro-civil rights brief in what would become one of the most celebrated civil rights cases in American history: Brown v. Board of Education. Although seemingly at odds with the restrictive approach to individual rights in other contexts, the U.S. government's participation in the desegregation cases during the McCarthy era was no anomaly. Rather, by the early 1950s, American leaders had come to believe that civil rights reform was crucial to the more central U.S. mission of fighting world communism. Based in part on diplomatic research in State Department archives, this article demonstrates that Cold War motives influenced the U.S. government's involvement in Brown and other cases. Originally published in 1988 in the Stanford Law Review, this article was the first publication to use State Department records to examine the relationship between Cold War foreign relations and civil rights in the United States. Diplomatic records illustrate the growing concern among American diplomats and political leaders after World War II about the impact of race discrimination on the U.S. image around the world, and the global critique that the United States could not be an effective "leader of the free world" as long as the nation blatantly denied rights to its own peoples. This research confirmed the suspicions of Derrick Bell and others who argued before these records were opened that foreign affairs affected U.S. government civil rights policies, and it helped illuminate the world-wide impact of the civil rights movement. This research was expanded upon in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000), and in books and articles by other scholars. The larger body of work on race and foreign relations is an important aspect of efforts by historians to "internationalize" the study of American history. Thanks to the Stanford Law Review, the article is now available on SSRN so that it will be easily accessible on-line.

Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court's Certiorari Decisions

Abstract: W T He examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court, and its decision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own preferences, exploiting ambiguity in cases'fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from lower courts regardless of the facts of the case or the relative ideology of the judges. But a conservative higher court probabilistically reviews liberal decisions, with the "audit rate" tied to observable facts and the ideology of the lower court judge. We derive comparative static results and test them with a random sample of search-and-seizure cases appealed to the Burger Court between 1972 and 1986. The evidence broadly supports the model. H ierarchical control of organizations is problematic throughout the realm of politics. Congress and presidents attempt to control agencies, upper levels of bureaucracies attempt to control lower levels, and higher courts strive to control lower courts. With incomplete information about their subordinates' decisions and knowledge, superiors in rule-based hierarchies often employ some form of auditing. In this article we study how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to pluck a relative handful of cases from a plethora of potential candidates for review. Our point of departure is the role of review in enforcing the doctrinal preferences of the Supreme Court within the judicial hierarchy. We begin by presenting a game-theoretic model of

Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It)

Abstract: Prelude: The Wisdom of Thomas Jefferson Introduction: A Tale of Two Signings 1. The Ratification Referendum: Sending the Constitution to a New Convention for Repair 2. Our Undemocratic Legislative Process 3. The Legacy of Article II: Too-Powerful Presidents, Chosen in an Indefensible Process, Who Cannot Be Displaced Even When They Are Manifestly Incompetent 4. Life Tenure for Supreme Court Justices: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed 5. The Constitution as Creator of Second-Class Citizens 6. The Impermeable Article V 7. Disenchantment and Desire: What Is to Be Done? Coda: The Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson Appendix: The Constitution of the United States Notes Acknowledgments Index

Personal Attribute Models of the Voting Behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Liberalism in Civil Liberties and Economics Decisions, 1946–1978

Abstract: The prevailing view among students of judicial politics is that judges' background characteristics or personal attributes cannot provide satisfactory explanations for variation in their decision-making behavior. Parsimonious attribute models reported here account for 70 to 90 percent of the variance in the voting of postwar Supreme Court justices in split decisions concerning civil rights and liberties, and economics. Seven variables representing six meaningful and easily interpretable concepts achieve this success. The concepts are Judge's Party Identification, Appointing President, Prestige of Prelaw Education (economics only), Appointed from Elective Office, Appointment Region (civil liberties only), Extensiveness of Judicial Experience, and Type of Prosecutorial Experience. The impressive performance of these models is attributed to superior measurement, operationalization, and model building; to a greater similarity between personal attribute models and more fully specified ones than has been assumed; and to the possibility that the attitudes which intervene between the personal attributes and the voting of judges are causally very closely linked to voting.

Wealth Neutrality and Local Choice in Public Education

Abstract: A series of recent judicial decisions has focused public attention on the issue of local choice in the provision of public education. In Serrano vs. Priest, Rodriguez vs. San Antonio (1971), and similar cases in other states, the lower courts confirmed that education is a responsibility of the state government and held that local expenditures on education may not be a function of the taxable wealth of the local community.1 Although the United States Supreme Court has overturned these decisions in the appeal of Rodriguez vs. San Antonio (1973), the pressure to change the current system remains strong. The Supreme Court majority indicated that its decision reflected the limits of the federal constitutional authority and was not an approval of the status quo in educational finance. Litigation is now likely to shift to challenging the current methods as unconstitutional under state constitutions which, unlike the federal constitution, do deal specifically with education.2 Moreover, fundamental changes in the financing of local education may not require further pressure from the courts; state legislatures may seek to neutralize the effects of local wealth differences even if the current systems are not held to be unconstitutional. These judicial decisions and the ensuing legislative proposals run counter to the general economic view of local government finance. The basic presumption of economic analysis is that, because local governments can select different levels of service and because individuals can choose their area of residence, decentralized finance by local governments allows the provision of public services to reflect the variety of individual preferences for public services.3 Although the level of local spending may be nonoptimal because of intercommunity externalities and because of the method of local budget determination, fiscal decentralization still remains the only alternative to the insuperable problem of determining the optimal level of expenditure on a public service provided by a central government. In effect, autonomous decentralized financing of education provides a quasi market in which households can exercise their diverse preferences by their location decisions. This paper considers the problem of * Professor of economics, Harvard University. I am grateful to Charles Clotfelter for assistance with the statistical analysis, to Stephen Weiss for providing unpublished data on school expenditures, and to the Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation for financial support. I have benefited from discussions of an earlier version in seminars at Harvard, M.I.T., and Berkeley, and from comments by Noel Edelson, Eric Toder, and David Stern. An earlier and more complete discussion of this study was distributed as Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper no. 293, May 1973 (revised July 1973). 1 In Serrano vs. Priest, the landmark case in this area, the plaintiff and the courts were very much influenced by the line of argument and suggested remedies develope(l in John Coons et al. For a further discussion of the legal precedents, see Arthur Wise. 2 Almost immediately after the United States Supreme Court decision in Rodriguez vs. San Antonio, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the current system of local finance violated the New Jersey state constitution. See Wise for a summary of the provisions of other state constitutions. I Charles Tiebout presented a formal analysis of the full efficiency of local government provision of public services under quite special conditions. See Wallace Oates and James Buchanan and Charles Goetz for a further discussion of these issues.