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.

The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession, Commodification and Life Patents in Canada

Abstract: In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless, consolidate private claims to life as patentable inventions, and critics claim, with some support from Justices in the Schmeiser case, that patents over genes amount to de facto patents over whole organisms. In this paper I argue these cases are broadly consistent with the notion of accumulation by dispossession as a means to expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so-called ‘extra-economic’ means. As such, I examine the cases as privatizations, but also as relational moments in the commodification of nature. However, in hoping to unpack and fill out this notion of the extra-economic, as well as to critically examine the necessarily incomplete character of commodification as a tendency, I look to the ways in which judges and interested activists deliberate over the economic, legal, ecological, ethical, and even metaphysical arguments and representations required to uphold discrete genes, processes, and whole organisms as inventions.

Politics and Judgment in Federal District Courts

Abstract: Are appointment politics and court decisions linked? Do presidents use judicial appointments to shape their policy agendas? C. K. Rowland and Robert Carp provide definitive answers to these questions and, in the process, provide a new paradigm for the study of federal jurisprudence. As the authors remind us, since the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal trial judges have been politically appointed, a process frequently the object of partisan scorn. Marshall's famous "Marbury v. Madison" case was triggered by the highly politicized appointment of William Marbury. FDR tried to protect his New Deal programs by choosing judges sympathetic to his political philosophy. Nixon and Carter were accused of nominating judges on the basis of ideological "litmus tests." And Reagan attracted relentless criticism to his own district-court appointments. From Woodrow Wilson to George Bush, Rowland and Carp examine the voting patterns of these presidentially appointed trial judges. Working from attorney interviews and more than 45,000 court rulings from 1933 to 1988-the largest and most current database available-they document the undeniable link between politics and jurisprudence in the federal lower courts. Rejecting the outmoded and reductionist attitudinal (or behavioral) model for a new one based on cognitive psychology, the authors argue that federal trial judges' decisions do not automatically reflect the policies and ideologies of that judge's presidential appointer. They show, instead, that ideology influences but does not predetermine or control judicial decision-making. They demonstrate further that, while the attitudinal model can help us understand judicial behavior at the appellate and Supreme Court level, it's simply incompatible with fact-finding, the primary duty of trial judges. In an era of expanding power and influence for federal trial judges, declining faith in our legal system, and increasingly divisive partisan politics the federal judiciary and its appointed judges will remain the focus of intense public scrutiny. This book shows us just how such analysis should be conducted.

Comparing Attitudinal and Strategic Accounts of Dissenting Behavior on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Abstract: Students of judicial behavior have increasingly turned to strategic accounts to understand judicial decision making. Scholarship on the Supreme Court and state high courts suggests that the decision to dissent is better understood in light of strategic considerations rather than simply reflecting ideological disagreement. We investigate whether these findings comport with behavior by judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We develop a spatial model of the decision to dissent that incorporates both attitudinal and strategic elements and subject this model to empirical analysis. We find that ideological disagreement between a judge and the majority opinion writer is a more persuasive explanation of the decision to dissent than a strategic account in which a judge conditions a dissent on whether circuit intervention would obtain the judge's preferred outcome. Though we do not discount the existence of other types of strategic behavior on the Courts of Appeals, our research suggests that strategic accounts of dissenting behavior are not generalizable to all courts.

Ideological Divergence and Public Support for the Supreme Court

Abstract: We examine the degree to which aggregate-level support for the Supreme Court is a function of its divergence from the ideological mood of the country. We first overcome the problem of irregular and infrequent measurement of attitudes toward the Supreme Court by employing an approach developed by Stimson (1991) which allows us to pool seventeen similar survey items administered a total of ninety-three times to produce a single, semi-annual time series of support for the Supreme Court, extending from 1973 through 1993. We then consider the effect of the Court's ideological position on the level of support it enjoys. In contrast to previous research, we take into account that both the Court's and the public's ideological preferences vary over time. Our analysis indicates that the public's appraisal of the Supreme Court responds not to the Court's ideological position per se, but rather to the extent to which the Court's position diverges from the ideological preferences of the citizenry; when the Court deviates from the public mood, its support erodes. Scholars have long been interested in determining and explaining levels of public support for the Supreme Court. As a result, we know a great deal about the determinants of individual-level attitudes toward the Supreme Court (cf. Mondak and Grosskopf 1998; Caldeira and Gibson 1992; and references therein). We know less, however, about the ebb and flow of Court support over time (but see Mondak and Smithey 1997; Caldeira 1986, 1987). A major obstacle to studying the dynamics of Court support has been the infrequent and inconsistent manner in which survey organizations have queried citizens' attitudes toward the Court. Here, we offer an approach to the available data that allows us to measure support for the Supreme Court on a semi-annual basis over a twenty-year period. We then use this unique series to model Court support as a function of its divergence from the public's ideological mood. In contrast to past work, we take into account that both the Court's ideological position and the public mood vary over time and focus on the shifting divergence and convergence of the two as an explanation for changes in support for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court and Local Public Opinion

Abstract: people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions. R esearch on the relationship between specific Supreme Court decisions and public support for the Court has been frustrated by the apparent public ignorance of all but the most controversial and visible cases (see Caldeira 1991). In the standard account, citizens are portrayed as quite willing to offer an opinion about the institution, but they do so without knowledge of many individual decisions. Thus, many scholars conclude that support for the Court rests upon more enduring attitudes about the legitimacy of the Court in the system of government rather than on agreement or disagreement with specific decisions. Although most research suggests that the majority of Court decisions go unnoticed, the possibility that these decisions influence attitudes toward the institution is not without some support in the literature. The connection has been established in experimental research (Mondak 1991, 1992; Segal 1995) but has not been very well documented outside the laboratory. The reason is straightforward: If Court decisions are not common knowledge, by definition they can have no effect. One major obstacle is that most national surveys do a poor job of identifying conditions in which people are motivated to learn about specific Court decisions and in which they have sufficient access to information about them (but see Franklin and Kosaki 1995; Franklin, Kosaki, and Kritzer 1993; Hoekstra and Segal 1996). Consequently, we may be underestimating the importance of citizens' reactions as an element of support for the Court. One instance in which interest and access to information are likely to be high is the local communities where a controversy began. People should be more interested in cases that involve members of their own community than in cases that involve individuals or groups from somewhere else (Boninger, Berent, and