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 Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe

Abstract: In the former Eastern Bloc countries, one of the most important, and most difficult, aspects of the transition to democracy has been the establishment of constitutional justice and the rule of law. Herman Schwartz's wide-ranging book is the first to chronicle and analyze the rise of constitutional courts in this changing region. Beginning with a brief history of the courts prior to 1989, Schwartz draws on his expertise as a constitutional scholar and long-time adviser to many of these countries to compare their jurisprudence with relevant American and West European law. He then focuses in detail on the relative success stories of Poland and Hungary, where the courts faced little opposition, and the more problematic situations in Russia, Slovakia and Bulgaria, where the courts' independence and very existence were threatened by both old-line communists and new-style authoritarians. With a wealth of historical and other information, backed up by a massive array of research, the book is a remarkably rich, yet accessible, source for anyone interested in the ongoing struggles of post-Communist Europe.

Not the whole story: The impact of justices' values on supreme court decision making

Abstract: A half century of empirical scholarship has now firmly established that the ideological values and the policy preferences of Supreme Court justices have a profound impact on their decisions in many cases. The prior work of Segal and Spaeth (both collaborative and independent) has made important contributions to our understanding of the linkages between these preferences and the justices' decisions (Rohde and Spaeth 1976; Segal 1984; Segal and Cover 1989; Segal and Spaeth 1993). Their most recent work (Segal and Spaeth 1996) provides additional evidence that for the set of important policy making cases they examine, the policy preferences of the justices have a significant effect on judicial votes. While this research makes it clear that preferences play an important role in the justices' decision making process, it does not establish that preferences eclipse precedent and legal doctrine completely. Segal and Spaeth (1996) argue that there has been no systematic empirical evidence of the role of legal factors, including precedent, at the Supreme Court level. Several studies, nevertheless, have provided bits of evidence that, when considered together, suggest that legal factors do matter. For example, Epstein and Koblyka's 1992 study of death penalty and abortion decisions indicates that the substantive legal arguments presented to the Court play an important role in doctrinal development and alteration. Similarly, H.W. Perry's 1991 study of the Court's agenda-setting process, which demonstrated the justices' concern for the jurisprudential, as well as the policy implications of cases selected for review, further reinforces the view that law and precedent matter in the Supreme Court. Although Perry did not investigate decisions on the merits, justices who place cases on the docket for jurisprudential reasons should be attentive to those same jurisprudential concerns at the merits stage. These studies may not provide a systematic assessment of precedent and the justices' decisions. But they do suggest that it matters. Regardless of this evidence in support of the legal model, Segal and Spaeth continue to adhere to their position that precedent has virtually no impact on the

Who counts? the politics of census-taking in contemporary america

Abstract: This article describes some of the legal decisions and problems among politicians and demographers who produce US census counts of population. The impact of the US Supreme Court hearing and decision in Wisconsin vs New York is discussed followed by an analysis of the Census Bureaus plans for the Census in 2000. Census procedures have been challenged since 1988. Litigation forced the use of the Post Enumeration Survey for adjusting the 1990 Census but the Census Director in 1991 issued a recommendation for not adjusting the 1990 counts that was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in April 1993. Oral arguments were heard in the aforementioned New York case on January 10 1996. New York argued for the implementation of dual system estimation due to undercounting errors that were probably influenced by actions of Republican Commerce officials during the 1980s that prevented improvements in census counting. It was charged that Census Bureau methods violated the intent of Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection. Lawsuits challenged the Bureau to develop methods that would reduce the undercount of minorities and the urban poor. Other arguments of the state of Oklahoma Wisconsin the federal government for the Secretary of Commerce and New York City are summarized. The Solicitor General of the US Drew Days argued that the true total population of the US was unknown and unknowable and that the Secretary of Commerce had the authority to make decisions about the census. The main issue before the court became who had the authority to decide not to adjust. All of the US Supreme Court judges voted on March 20 1996 in favor of unadjusted census counts. The issue of statistical adjustment methods as a violation of the Constitution was not decided. Plans for the census of 2000 include reducing costs and increasing accuracy through a three-stage count strategy.

Capital punishment and contemporary values: People's misgivings and the court's misperceptions

Abstract: IIwenty years after the Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes (Furman v. Georgia 1972) and a day after Justice Thurgood Marshall's death, the senior Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun, charged the Court with coming "perilously close to murder" in its latest death penalty ruling. He made this charge in an unusual oral dissent from a decision which held that a federal appeals court could not hear newly developed evidence of a death row inmate's possible innocence (Herrera v. Collins 1992). The Court, nine months earlier, had barred a lower federal court from hearing new evidence challenging execution by asphyxiation as cruel punishment (Gomez v. U.S. District Court 1992) and had then taken the unprecedented step of ordering no further stays of execution (Vasquez v. Harris 1992).1 How did we reach this point when 20 years earlier the Court had declared that the death penalty as applied was too arbitrary to be constitutionally ac-

Popular influence on supreme court decisions

Abstract: In their 1993 article in this Review, William Mishler and Reginald Sheehan reported evidence of both direct and indirect impacts of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions. Helmut Norpoth and Jeffrey Segal offer a methodological critique and in their own reanalysis of the data find, contrary to Mishler and Sheehan, no evidence for a direct path of influence from public opinion to Court decisions. Instead, they find an abrupt-permanent shift of judicial behavior consistent with an indirect model of influence whereby popularly elected presidents, through new appointments, affect the ideological complexion of the Court. In response, Mishler and Sheehan defend the direct public opinion linkage originally noted, at both individual and aggregate level; respond to the methodological critique; and offer further statistical analysis to support the aggregate linkages.