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.

Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board

Abstract: This case note discusses the decision of the UK Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board, a case concerning the negligent failure by a doctor to disclose a risk associated with childb...

Putting Polarization in Perspective

Abstract: In mid-2003, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, attempted to rush a ninety-page pension reform bill through his committee. Not having had an opportunity to read the bill, the Democratic members fled the committee room to review the legislation in an adjacent library. An irate Thomas called for an immediate vote and passed the bill with only one Democrat, Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.), still in the room. When Stark objected to Thomas's tactics, Representative Scott McInnis (R-Col.), a majority party committee member and Thomas ally, told Stark to “shut up.” The seventy-one-year-old Stark challenged McInnis, twenty-one years his junior, to “make him” shut up and then repeatedly called him a “little fruitcake.” Chairman Thomas took the unusual step of calling the Capitol Police to subdue Stark and eject the Democrats from the library. Although such a move was not unprecedented in the modern era, it was, to say the least, highly irregular. This is emblematic of the intense polarization that characterizes contemporary American politics. There are many indications that American politics is now more sharply divided and more intensely conflicted than has typically been the case. A distinctly conservative Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of the conservative candidate who was the popular vote loser, causing Democrats much consternation and Republicans much exhilaration. Income inequality has reached its highest point since the United States started keeping such data in the 1940s (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006), and class-based voting has become the most pronounced it has been in at least the last fifty years (Stonecash 2000; Bartels 2006).

The Principle and Practice of Women's 'Full Citizenship': A Case Study of Sex-Segregated Public Education

Abstract: For more than a quarter century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that sex-based state action is subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. But the Court has always been much less clear about what that standard allows and what it prohibits. For this reason, it is especially noteworthy that one of the Court's most recent sex discrimination opinions, United States v. Virginia, purports to provide more coherent guidance. Virginia suggests that the constitutionality of sex-based state action turns on whether the practice at issue denies women "full citizenship stature" or "create[s] or perpetuate[s] the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women." Yet the opinion does not begin to indicate how the sex discrimination jurisprudence might implement this new standard. In particular, it does not tell us how to determine whether any specific practice deprives women of "full citizenship" or maintains their "inferiority." This Article attempts to give some content to the framework that Virginia presents. More specifically, it explores how analyzing the historical record of a practice can inform an investigation into whether, when, and why that practice is consistent with women's "full citizenship stature" or operates to perpetuate their "legal, social, and economic inferiority." The Article takes the historical record of sex-segregated public education in the United States as its case study. That record is an especially apt place to begin because Virginia directly concerned the constitutional status of a single-sex public school.

The Supreme Court and Critical Elections

Abstract: Several years ago Professor Robert Dahl argued that the traditional concern over the Supreme Court's power of judicial review was largely unfounded. Dahl demonstrated that seldom, if ever, had the Court been successful in blocking the will of a law-making majority. This paper argues that, had Dahl considered his data from a different perspective, he would have discovered that, by virtue of the recruitment process, the Court will rarely even attempt to thwart a law-making majority. Examining Dahl's data in the context of the Survey Research Center's election classification scheme, the paper focuses on the Court's relation to patterns of partisan change to show that the traditional philosophic concern with the counter-majoritarian nature of judicial review is largely divorced from empirical reality and has relevance only during periods of partisan realignment within the political system as a whole. The paper buttresses the argument that the Court's “yea-saying” power is more important than its “nay-saying” power, a realization which can serve as the premise from which a logically consistent justification of the Court's power of judicial review may be dialectically constructed.

Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America

Abstract: Exposes the U.S. Supreme Court's history of racism against American Indians. Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned "like a loaded weapon" in the Supreme Court's Indian law decisions. Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall's foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in International Law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians.