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.

Judicial Independence: The Politics of the Supreme Court in Mexico

Abstract: This article examines the role of the Supreme Court in the development of the Mexican political system. The judiciary provided an important source of regime legitimation, as it allowed for the consolidation of a state of legality and a claim to constitutional rule of law, at least in discourse. However, the judiciary was in effect politically subordinated to the logic of dominant party rule through both specific constitutional reforms since 1917 that weakened the possibility of judicial independence and a politics of institutional and political co-optation. The constitutional reform of 1994 has significantly altered the nature of the relationship between the executive and the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Roberts's Health Care Decision Disrobed: The Microfoundations of the Supreme Court's Legitimacy

Abstract: The 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act was an unusual opportunity for people to form or reassess opinions about the Supreme Court. We utilize panel data coupled with as-if random assignment to reports that Chief Justice Roberts's decision was politically motivated to investigate the microfoundations of the Court's legitimacy. Specifically, we test the effects of changes in individuals' ideological congruence with the Court and exposure to the nonlegalistic account of the decision. We find that both affect perceptions of the Court's legitimacy. Moreover, we show that these mechanisms interact in important ways and that prior beliefs that the Court is a legalistic institution magnify the effect of updating one's ideological proximity to the Court. While we demonstrate that individuals can and did update their views for multiple reasons, we also highlight constraints that allow for aggregate stability in spite of individual-level change.

'You Are Entering a Gay- and Lesbian-Free Zone': On the Radical Dissents of Justice Scalia and Other (Post-) Queers

Abstract: The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The court's ruling is the coup de grace to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal law representations. As a matter of federal due process, courts reviewing penal legislation must now deploy some other principle to distinguish between permissible and impermissible majoritarian moral opprobrium. What that other principle will consist of is not clear. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the majority in Lawrence offers a dizzying array of possibilities - a rhetorical smorgasbord of legal authority. Justice Kennedy's pastiche is, at a legal theoretical level, incoherent and under normal circumstances - in many other cases - would be internally contradictory. The theoretical incoherence and rhetorical overkill of Justice Kennedy's opinion lends credence to Justice Antonin Scalia's incendiary dissent in Lawrence, specifically to the idea that the majority's holding is no technical knock-out victory for liberal legalism, but rather a politically or culturally partisan decision. What is missing from Justice Scalia's dissent, though, are the important nuances and subtleties that shape the contemporary sex wars, that make them so fascinating and so unpredictable, and that both resignify and ambiguate the purported gay victory in Lawrence. This Foreword probes the fragmentation of sexual projects in the West and its implications for the sex wars and the penal law. It is intended as a guide or manual for the interpretation of the result in Lawrence and future sex battles. Part I focuses on the fracturing of sexual projects and demonstrates that it is, today, far too simplistic - in fact profoundly counterproductive - to describe the culture wars as a two-party conflict or to talk about a "homosexual agenda." In the Lawrence litigation, this point was brought home in the surprising coalition opposing the Texas statute. The question this raises is: what kinds of fissures split the gay community? What would it sound like to argue from a gay-friendly perspective against the ruling in Lawrence? Part II explores this question and develops, through a pastiche of radical statements, a politics that embraces the marginal, even criminal desire to transgress for the sake of transgression, that thrives on rebellion against hegemonic legal regimes. With this in place, Part III reconstructs Scalia's radical dissent and sharpens it to produce a keener interpretive framework to understand the result in Lawrence and future sex wars. Scalia is right that there is a culture war and that the courts are inextricably involved in those wars. He is also right that the court is shaped by the legal profession and that their decisions are largely shaped by the law profession culture. This culture and the legal academy that reproduces it are by and large more tolerant of homosexuality than many other sectors of society. The decision in Lawrence is the product of this law profession culture, and, at least on the surface, is gay-friendly - it favors the interests of liberal pro-gay-rights advocates. But it does not necessarily promote the interests of all gay-friendly. It is here that the Foreword probes the Lawrence decision - dark side and all.

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap

Abstract: The usual legal story about partisan gerrymandering is relentlessly pessimistic. The courts did not even recognize the cause of action until the 1980s; they have never struck down a district plan on this basis; and four sitting Justices want to vacate the field altogether. The Supreme Court’s most recent gerrymandering decision, however, is the most encouraging development in this area in a generation. Several Justices expressed interest in the concept of partisan symmetry — the idea that a plan should treat the major parties symmetrically in terms of the conversion of votes to seats — and suggested that it could be shaped into a legal test.In this Article, we take the Justices at their word. First, we introduce a new measure of partisan symmetry: the efficiency gap. It represents the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. It captures, in a single tidy number, all of the packing and cracking decisions that go into a district plan. It also is superior to the metric of gerrymandering, partisan bias, that litigants and scholars have used until now. Partisan bias can be calculated only by shifting votes to simulate a hypothetical tied election. The efficiency gap eliminates the need for such counterfactual analysis.Second, we compute the efficiency gap for congressional and state house plans between 1972 and 2012. Over this period as a whole, the typical plan was fairly balanced and neither party enjoyed a systematic advantage. But in recent years — and peaking in the 2012 election — plans have exhibited steadily larger and more pro-Republican gaps. In fact, the plans in effect today are the most extreme gerrymanders in modern history. And what is more, several likely will remain extreme for the remainder of the decade, as indicated by our sensitivity testing.Finally, we explain how the efficiency gap could be converted into doctrine. We propose setting thresholds above which plans would be presumptively unconstitutional: two seats for congressional plans and eight percent for state house plans, but only if the plans probably will stay unbalanced for the rest of the cycle. Plans with gaps above these thresholds would be unlawful unless states could show that the gaps either resulted from the consistent application of legitimate policies, or were inevitable due to the states’ political geography. This approach would neatly slice the Gordian knot the Court has tied for itself, explicitly replying to the Court’s “unanswerable question” of “how much political...effect is too much.”