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.

Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract: We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an "open rule" for the other justices. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship - its legal quality. The effort-cost of producing a high quality opinion creates a wedge that the assignee can exploit to move an opinion from the median without provoking a winning counter-offer. We use this bargaining model as the foundation for a formal analysis of opinion assignment. Both the bargaining and opinion assignment models display rich and tractable comparative statics, allowing them to explain well-known empirical regularities as well as generate new propositions, within a unified and internally consistent framework.

The Right to Mobility: The Production of Mobility in the Courtroom

Abstract: This paper considers the way mobility has been given meaning by decisions in the United States Supreme Court. It argues that in four key decisions the Court constructed a de facto “right to mobility” by linking mobility to notions of citizenship. The paper suggests that these cases illustrate the importance of considering how mobilities are given meaning in particular contexts and how these meanings are framed within notions of mobility as an essential human freedom. The paper is framed by discussions of mobility, rights and citizenship and concludes with a discussion of the role of othering in the production of mobility-as-citizenship.

Killing and letting die

Abstract: This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

Measuring Political Preferences

Abstract: Theory: When analysts adopt surrogates of actors' political preferences for purposes unanticipated by the inventors of those measures, they often stretch (but not explicitly assess) the range of reliability and validity. Hypotheses: The consequences pushing measures beyond their intended purposes may significantly impact research findings, as well as the conclusions drawn from those findings. Methods: "Methodological audit" of measures developed by Segal and Cover (1989) to represent the political preferences of justices on the United States Supreme Court. Mainly regression analysis using the Segal/Cover scores and vote data drawn from the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database. Results: Analysts would be well advised to weigh carefully whether adequate tests have been performed before adopting others' preference measures for their own research. More specific conclusions are: 1) scholars should invoke the Segal/Cover scores in the set of circumstances indicated by their developers: aggregated individual-level decisions in civil liberties cases; and 2) students of the judicial process who seek to explore phenomena other than aggregated individual-level voting in civil liberties cases ought to give serious thought to devising new surrogates for judicial preferences.

Lobbying for Justice: Organized Interests Supreme Court Nominations, and United States Senate

Abstract: Theory: By providing information to senators and their constituents about how nominees are likely to behave on the Court if confirmed; and by communicating information about constituents' preferences through grassroots lobbying campaigns, interest groups help shape senators' preferences for nominees and inform them about the appropriate importance to attach to constituency preferences. Hypotheses: We argue that interest groups play an important role in shaping senators' decisions. The empirical implication of our argument is that unless some account of groups' lobbying efforts is included in models used to explain congressional voting, the importance of traditional predictors such as ideology and constituency will be exaggerated. Method: Using data from surveys of organized interests' activities on the Bork, Souter, and Thomas nominations, we estimate the coefficients for our model with a two-stage OLS-probit procedure. Results: Our empirical analyses indicate that interest group lobbying has a statistically significant effcct on senators' confirmation votes on all three nominations.