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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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TL;DR: The early 1940s marked a period in which the consensus norms of the Supreme Court experienced a radical and apparently permanent change as mentioned in this paper, and the consistent pattern of relatively high cohesion characteristic of the Court's earlier years gave way to surging rates of concurring and dissenting opinions.
Abstract: The early 1940s marked a period in which the consensus norms of the Supreme Court experienced a radical and apparently permanent change. The consistent pattern of relatively high cohesion characteristic of the Court's earlier years gave way to surging rates of concurring and dissenting opinions. The present research is an examination of the factors possibly contributing to the justices' sharply increasing tendency to express their individual views rather than to defer to the opinion of the Court. Using both historical and quantitative methods, the authors evaluate the impact of the Court's discretionary jurisdiction, changing caseload, associate justice characteristics, and judicial leadership. The evidence presented points to the conclusion that in combination with other factors the leadership style introduced by Harlan Fiske Stone in 1941 had a dramatic effect on the consensus norms of the Court.

151 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: Rasmusen et al. as discussed by the authors showed that the naked exclusion theory does not support exclusive dealing on a per se or summary basis and that exclusive dealing often serves legitimate business purposes, as Judge Stephen Breyer wrote in his 1987 opinion in Interface Group, Inc v. Massachusetts Port Authority.
Abstract: We are grateful to Ilya Segal and Michael Whinston for improving our analysis. We are pleased they confirm our two main conclusions. The first is that normally a firm cannot use contracts with its customers or suppliers inefficiently to exclude a rival from competition, because the high price of these contracts will make this strategy unprofitable. This is an old point, well summarized in Robert Bork's 1978 book. Second, and in contrast, exclusionary contracts can be profitable, effective, and socially inefficient -- under certain limited conditions. One condition is that firms in the industry must be able to operate only at or above some minimum efficient scale. Another condition is that the victims -- customers or suppliers -- must expect that the exclusionary tactic will succeed, and must be unable to coordinate their actions to defeat the tactic. An excluding firm in this situation can buy naked exclusion affordably because it can scare victims into selling cheaply; no single victim can stop the exclusion by itself, so no single victim has any bargaining power. At a theoretical limit, the excluding firm can gain the exclusionary rights for free. This striking result has implications for antitrust policy by suggesting that naked exclusion is, in theory, a potentially viable threat to efficient competition. Also striking from an antitrust perspective, however, is the lack of fit between this theory and the cases in which the United States Supreme Court has forged the law most relevant to exclusionary conduct. A simple legal label for contracts of naked exclusion is "exclusive dealing": "You agree to deal only with me, and not with my competitors." The facts of the three relevant Supreme Court cases, however, clearly violate the assumptions of the naked exclusion theory, as we explain in Rasmusen, Ramseyer and Wiley (1998). Two important conclusions follow. We cannot establish whether this kind of naked exclusion ever really happens by looking at the three legally most relevant cases. The theory awaits other empirical testing. And second, naked exclusion - if it ever really occurs - cannot be the only explanation for exclusive dealing. Rather, exclusive dealing "often" serves legitimate business purposes, as Judge (now Justice) Stephen Breyer wrote in his 1987 opinion in Interface Group, Inc v. Massachusetts Port Authority. The theory at hand thus does not support outlawing exclusive dealing on a per se or summary basis. If a legal prohibition is justified at all, any sensible legal test would have to be far more discriminating. Lawyers and judges who might seek to translate this theory into practice, please take note.

151 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on diffuse support for the Supreme Court, an institution for which popular esteem is especially important, and direct their attention toward African Americans, one of the most important minorities in American politics.
Abstract: Diffuse support is a central concept in efforts to explain institutional stability. Supportive attitudes constitute a reservoir of good will especially useful for institutional maintenance when political authorities make policies with which many disagree. Here we focus on diffuse support for the Supreme Court, an institution for which popular esteem is especially important, and direct our attention toward African Americans, one of the most important minorities in American politics. Using data from an unusually large national sample of blacks in 1987, we describe the attitudes of this group toward the Supreme Court and compare them to those of whites, and we also offer and test two competing theoretical accounts of support in this segment of the population. In contrast to earlier eras, blacks are on balance fairly positive toward the Court but they are decidedly less positive than are whites. We can explain a significant portion of the persistent support among blacks for the Court as a residue of positive ...

151 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper found evidence that public support for the retributive doctrine is closely linked to affiliation with fundamentalist Protestant denominations and fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the normative implications of such a connection are addressed.
Abstract: In Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that public opinion, including the public's presumed desire for retribution, can be a legitimate basis for penal policy. Subsequently, the retributive doctrine has guided sentencing reform across the nation. But variation among the public in support for retribution as the goal of punishment and the effects of religion in shaping public sentiments about punishment have received little attention from researchers. Drawing from recent work on attribution theory and religion, this paper proposes and reports evidence that public support for the retributive doctrine is closely linked to affiliation with fundamentalist Protestant denominations and fundamentalist religious beliefs. The normative implications of such a connection are addressed.

149 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Schubert's seminal work The Judicial Mind as discussed by the authors is a major attempt by the acknowledged dean of judicial behavioralists to explain both scientifically and unconventionally how Supreme Court Justices decide cases, concluding that the Justices who have sat on the Supreme Court since 1946 show a consistency of decision during their careers, that blocs of Justices may be identified by their responses to certain types of issues, and that the bloc with the greatest influence in any given term can be determined.
Abstract: The Judicial Mind: The Attitudes and Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices 1946-1963. By Glendon Schubert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Pp. 295. $10.00. The Judicial Mind1 is the major attempt by the acknowledged dean of judicial behavioralists to explain both scientifically and unconventionally how Supreme Court Justices decide cases.2 The commitment to a political science of judicial behavior is based on the premises that scientific social study is possible and that traditional constitutional scholarship is \"discursive commentary\" 3 which misses the real factors behind judicial decision, By scientific study, exponents mean research guided by an explicit theory, posing hypotheses with mathematical precision and objectivity which may be tested against real world evidence by an independent researcher.4 The Judicial Mind has received critical commendation for its analytical sophistication and novel conclusions, and has been hailed as a vindication of the genre.5 If they were not putatively rooted in a scientific analysis, Schubert's conclusions would seem modest. The summary findings are that the Justices who have sat on the Supreme Court since 1946 show a consistency of decision during their careers, that blocs of Justices may be identified by their responses to certain types of issues, and that the bloc with the greatest influence in any given term can be determined. Three blocs are most significant-the liberals (including Justices Black, Douglas, and Warren), the conservatives (including Justices Burton, Reed, and Vinson), and a moderating group referred to as \"the prag-

149 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