Supreme Court

Nel rigido quadro sistematico implicato dal principio di legalità durante i secoli XIX e XX, molteplici sono stati gli itinerari teorici svolti intorno al problema del rapporto tra diritto e società e sul come concepire, tramite la giurisprudenza, dinamiche di manifestazione del diritto autonome dalla mediazione del potere politico. Il saggio si propone di considerare percezioni della questione su due terreni chiave. Il primo è quello rappresentato dal dibattito sull’interpretazione del diritto, che, soprattutto nel periodo a cavallo dei due secoli, esprime una varietà di orientamenti favorevoli rivalutazione del ruolo del giurista. Il secondo terreno è quello dei profili sistematici della giurisdizione che, in diverse realtà nazionali (qui vengono considerati i casi della Francia, della Germania e dell’Italia), tendono ad essere ripensati per favorire una valorizzazione del momento giurisprudenziale. Anche su questi terreni però le declinazioni del discorso sembrano restare condizionate dal persistere di un orizzonte precomprensivo di tipo monistico. Le pagine conclusive del saggio, nel seguire la parabola di tale impostazione, portano l’attenzione sui caratteri del diritto giurisprudenziale nella fase attuale; si intende con ciò valutare se, in uno scenario europeo ormai connotato da un quadro ordinamentale pluralistico, può essere rinvenuta nell’autonomia del diritto una nuova prospettiva di senso.

English common law remains a marked outlier in the world of pre-nuptial agreements. The use of these agreements in the United States and European jurisdictions is commonplace, and whilst originally the preserve of the wealthy, they are now being contemplated by couples of more modest means. The fundamental purpose of these agreements is to achieve greater certainty over the division of their assets in the event of a marriage breakdown. The differences between English common law and most other Western countries have changed a great deal in the post-Radmacher English legal system. However, there remain some considerable gaps. This article shall seek to address those gaps and the potential issues that may arise in trying to take the ecumenical leap.

El presente trabajo tiene por objeto analizar el control judicial de constitucionalidad en Argentina. Se estudiará la organización del Poder Judicial, en particular el modo de designación y remoción de los magistrados de la Corte Suprema y de los tribunales federales inferiores. Se desarrollarán las características del sistema de control de constitucionalidad en Argentina, así como el requisito de “caso”, la posibilidad de declarar la inconstitucionalidad de oficio por parte de los tribunales, y el debate respecto de la obligatoriedad de los precedentes de la Corte Suprema. A su vez, se analizará la jurisdicción originaria y por apelación de la Corte Suprema. Finalmente, se hará referencia  a dos mecanismos introducidos recientemente por el máximo tribunal que ayudan a legitimar la actuación del Poder Judicial.

Palabras claves: Control de constitucionalidad – Poder Judicial – Legitimación – Precedente – Jurisdicción

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze judicial review in Argentina. The organization of the Judicial Power, in particular the procedure of appointment and removal of the judges of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts will be studied. The characteristics of judicial review system in Argentina will be developed, as well as the case or controversy requirement, the declaration of unconstitutionality ex officio by Courts, and the debate on whether precedents of the Supreme Court are mandatory. Also, the Supreme Court's original and appellate jurisdiction will be analyzed. Finally, reference will be made to two mechanisms recently introduced by the Supreme Court that helps legitimize the performance of the Judiciary.

Keywords: Judicial Review – Judicial branch – Standing – Precedent – Jurisdiction

In June 2015, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., upholding the use of disparate impact theory in cases brought under the Fair Housing Act. The opinion also contains language affirming the law’s commitment to advance residential integration. In light of the fears about what the Court might have done, the recent ruling has been cause for relief, yet fair housing advocates should be wary, because the majority also offered guidance about how many of these cases should be reviewed on the merits – and it is not favorably. In particular, the Court cautioned against allowing disparate impact claims to interfere with the complex, multifactor decisions of housing developers and municipal officials when they seek to improve neighborhoods and housing conditions, even when such decisions exacerbate or entrench segregated patterns. In disparate impact cases the analysis almost always turns on ...

The role and the decisions of the United Kingdom Supreme Court and of the Court of Session  in relation to the Scottish Parliament  have been discussed for a couple of years now. Without any doubt the role that the Supreme Court and the Court of Session fulfil today, in respect to Scotland, is not what it was in the beginning of the existence of the Scottish Parliament and perhaps not even what was strictly prescribed by section 29 of the Scotland Act 1998. This essay will present an analysis on the manner in which the check and balance mechanism has been implemented in Scotland within the scope of the fundamental UK constitutional principle : the Westminster Parliament supremacy. Secondly, this essay will seek to see if there are any limits for the UK Supreme Court and Court of Session in defining through case law, the powers of the Scottish Parliament.  Lastly, there will also be an analysis on the impact of the decisions of the UK Supreme Court and the Scottish Court of Session in relation to the nature and extent of the Scottish Parliament legislative power.

The purpose of this article is to empower those interested in teaching students powerful and engaging social studies. Through the lens of Supreme Court simulations, this article provides educators with a viable, classroom-tested lesson plan to bring Problem-Based Learning into their classrooms. The specific aim of the lesson is to provide students with an opportunity to engage in relevant and powerful civics education.

“Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law.” So reads McGirt v. Oklahoma, the most important reservation boundary case in the history of the Supreme Court. But before McGirt, courts often rewarded unlawful acts with reservation diminishment.  This Article first places McGirt in the context of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s century long fight to restore sovereign rights illegally denied after allotment, and the even longer fight by the Muscogee Nation and others to survive a trail of broken treaty promises.  It then corrects the false assumptions about the past and present of reservation boundaries that led the Court to turn lawbreaking into law.
As to the past, I show that the allotment-era Congress knew that reservations did not depend on land tenure, and that its statutes distinguished between allotment acts that diminished reservations and those that did not.  States, however, regularly broke the law, asserting jurisdiction in violation of federal Indian law rules.  Before McGirt, however, the Court falsely assumed that “[t]he notion that reservation status of Indian lands might not be coextensive with tribal ownership was unfamiliar at the turn of the century,” and so justified relying on state violations of tribal sovereignty as “evidence” of congressional intent.
As to the present, I show that reservation status is not disruptive for non-Indian communities, and often benefits tribal and non-tribal citizens alike. In high-profile cases in Tacoma, Washington and Pender, Oklahoma, life in those communities began to improve at the same time reservation boundaries were affirmed.  Throughout the country tribal governments contribute to the economies and social welfare of their surrounding communities. The Muscogee Nation, whose sophisticated law enforcement, health care, governance, and economic development arms already partner with non-tribal governments throughout its territory, exemplifies the benefits that strengthening tribal self-governance can provide.

McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020 has brought to light decades of debate on the sovereignty of the Tribes and the State. Oklahoma, of all states, has the highest concentration of indigenous nations at 38. The founding fathers of the United States created a constitutional republic. One in which the founders sought to expand with the hope of including the indigenous nations. However, the United States lost its foundational and Constitutional moorings by ignoring the Constitutional debates and understanding. This article seeks to analyze the sovereignty that the founders initially designed and influence on government within today's intergovernmental relations to the Tribal Nations.

In Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas, Professor James F. Simon paints the first major biography of Justice Douglas.  Simon’s book falls into the category of the inevitable demythologizing work.  There is little justification for probing the private life of a public figure unless that figure so postures himself that his private life and public portrayal reveal hypocrisy.  Simon brings to light the curious inconsistency between the justice’s opinions that seem to speak for the underprivileged and his callous treatment of those close to him.  The story does not demean the justice.  It does, however, place him in perspective, revealing what the reader knew all along—that he too was human.

Taşınmaz mal satış sözleşmesi kurulurken veya bu sözleşmenin kurulmasından sonra yargı kararına konu olan birçok sorun ortaya çıkmaktadır. Bu sorunlardan biri de sözleşmeden yahut reklam vb. vasıtalarla vaat edilmesi sebebiyle doğan borcun gereği gibi ifa edilmemesidir (kötü ifa). Borcun gereği gibi ifa edilmemesi hâlleri çeşitlilik göstermektedir. Bu hâllerden ikisi ayıplı ifa ile eksik ifa halidir. Ayıplı ifa, özel olarak hem 6098 sayılı Türk Borçlar Kanunu’nda hem de gerek 4077 sayılı Tüketicinin Korunması Hakkında Kanun’da gerekse 6502 sayılı Tüketicinin Korunması Hakkında Kanun’da düzenlenmiştir. Eski tarihli Yargıtay kararlarının bir kısmında, eksik ifa halleri ayıplı ifa hâli olarak değerlendirilmiş ve yanlış kararlar tesis edilmiştir. Eksik ifanın ayıplı ifa olarak değerlendirilmesi tüketici aleyhine sonuçlar doğurmaktadır. Bu durum Tüketici Kanunu’nun ruhuna da aykırıdır. Ancak Yargıtay, yakın tarihli kararlarında bu yanlıştan dönmüştür.

Many problems arise when establishing the contract for the sale of immovable property or after the establishment of this contract. One of these problems is that the promissed dept arising by contract or advertisement etc. is not properly performed (bad performance). The cases where the debt is not properly executed vary. Two of these cases are deficient performance and incomplete performance. The defective performance is specifically regulated in the Turkish Law of Obligations No. 6098 and in the Consumer Protection Law No. 4077 and in the Consumer Protection Law No. 6502. In some of the previous Supreme Court's decisions, incomplete performance cases were evaluated as deficient performance cases and wrong decisions were established. Evaluation of incomplete performance as deficient performance has consequences against the consumer. This situation is also against the spirit of the Consumer Law. However, the Supreme Court turned this wrong in its recent decisions.

This paper examines the legal treatment of hate speech in Canadian
society through the lens of John Stuart Mill’s Theory of Liberty. In doing so, the core aspects of Mills theory will be teased out so his response to hate speech in modern liberal societies may be better understood. The central argument set out is that hate speech is a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but such a violation is saved through application of Mill’s “Harm Principle”. Even with this application, the paper argues ought to be a balance of rights. It will be concluded that Canadian Supreme Court interpretations of the Charter, and for a large part the Charter’s drafting itself, lend themselves to be reminiscent of Mill’s theory of harm.

Fair Coverage of the Landmark Lawrence v. Texas case occurred only on certain networks and newspapers at certain times, according to a new study by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s (GLAAD) Center for the Study of Media and Society. University of Kansas Political Scientist Donald Haider-Markel found that the case was “largely ignored” in the months preceding the oral arguments, and then given in-depth coverage only by certain media outlets.

“High levels of media attention to an issue provide a context in which change in public opinion is more likely,” said Markel. “Thus, those seeking fair and accurate media coverage of LGBT issues can benefit from systematic examination of media coverage of this particular case.” According to the study, the number and depth of newspaper articles before June remained considerably low, as did the corresponding network coverage.

Accounting for the characteristics of media outlets, such as the circulation of a newspaper, newspapers that provided extensive coverage of the case included The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Texas Austin-American Statesman, Virginia Richmond Times Dispatch, and The North Carolina News and Observer. Low coverage newspapers included, USA Today, and the capital city newspapers of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. 

Of broadcast media outlets, PBS and CNN provided the most extensive and detailed coverage of the case, even when adjusting for variations in time devoted to news programming.  CBS provided the least coverage and the least in-depth coverage.

“Research shows that the tone of coverage can be skewed towards one side of an issue, and this skewed perspective makes certain government and opinion responses more likely than others,” notes Haider-Markel. However, even as networks such as Fox News presented the most negative bias of any network, a most networks discussed the case in an even-handed manner.

Christopher Buck, “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 959–963 (Vol. 3).

ABSRACT

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the principle problem of the 20th century will be that of the color line. Being black was “strange” largely because of the estrangement between the races in America. The “color line” was drawn in bold by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). By keeping the Jim Crow status quo, Plessy deepened the racial divide. This is the notorious “separate but equal” case. Although not part of the decision verbatim, these three words, which accurately express the legal fiction of the Supreme Court’s ruling, gave legal sanction to Jim Crow segregation. Thus “separate but equal” equals “Jim Crow affirmed.”

This opinion is couched in legal language that requires an understanding of constitutional law to decode. The high court held that the separation of the races within states does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which had previously granted African Americans equal protection under the laws. The technical terms notwithstanding, the Court’s purport was patent. In black and white, Justice Henry Billings Brown kept blacks from whites. This bad result was “good law” for nearly six decades. It would take Brown v. the Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) to overrule Justice Brown. If, except for the Dred Scott case, Plessy was the worst Supreme Court ruling ever handed down, as Justice Harlan indicated in his dissent, then the Brown decision may rank as the greatest Supreme Court decision. To appreciate the greatness of Brown v. Board of Education, it is necessary to understand Plessy first.

Democracy is a process of progressive equalizing. It is a matter of degree. Mollified by democratic language and reasoning, nevertheless Plessy is a harsh and fundamentally undemocratic decision. More than undemocratic, it was antidemocratic because Plessy may be characterized as an antidemocratic reaction to the then-recent democratic reforms of Reconstruction (1865–1877).

Reconstruction was the nation’s first experiment in economic emancipation and interracial democracy. The three Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively) established (legally but not factually) civil rights for all Americans. But the experiment failed; or rather, America failed the experiment. The reforms in- troduced by Reconstruction were being systematically dismantled in the South. For instance, the promise of “forty acres and a mule” was proclaimed by General William T. Sherman but never delivered by Congress. Reconstruction was progressive; Plessy was regressive. Plessy, in fact, was the ultimate deconstruction of Reconstruction—the final judicial nail in its historical coffin. Far worse were its social and historical consequences, for the decision legitimized legal segregation. Plessy was a pact with the devil of Jim Crow, and it legitimatized the American apartheid of systemic segregation.

Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine was an oxymoron. Yet, as the supreme law of the law, it held sway for well over a half-century. It would take the Brown decision to successfully overturn it. Brown v. Board of Edu- cation exposed the Plessy decision as a contradiction, ruling that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

Crippled Justice, the first comprehensive intellectual history of disability policy in the workplace from World War II to the present, explains why American employers and judges, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been so resistant to accommodating the disabled in the workplace. Ruth O'Brien traces the origins of this resistance to the postwar disability policies inspired by physicians and psychoanalysts that were based on the notion that disabled people should accommodate society rather than having society accommodate them.

O'Brien shows how the remnants of postwar cultural values bogged down the rights-oriented policy in the 1970s and how they continue to permeate judicial interpretations of provisions under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In effect, O'Brien argues, these decisions have created a lose/lose situation for the very people the act was meant to protect. Covering developments up to the present, Crippled Justice is an eye-opening story of government officials and influential experts, and how our legislative and judicial institutions have responded to them.

Download at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3539823

American law clerks often draft opinions for their judges. Yet American legal culture is remarkably diffident about that simple fact. The role that law clerks play in drafting opinions is not a secret. Far from it. But it might qualify to be somewhere in the outer vicinity of being an “open secret.” And it continues to be controversial.

This essay explores a set of questions about opinion-writing by law clerks. The first major question is meta-normative. The goal is not to decide whether the practice of law clerks drafting opinions is proper or improper, but why it is occluded and controversial in the first place. Specifically, why is there so much more diffidence and doubt about the role of law clerks than about the work of aides in the other branches of government such as Presidential speechwriters and Congressional staff?

The second question is hermeneutic. Should the fact that judges might not always draft their own opinions lead us to read and interpret those opinions differently, especially when we draw conclusions about the “jurisprudence” of this or that judge or Justice or the way that legal doctrines often seem to be shaped by longstanding, dialectical, debates among judges or Justices?

The discussion of both questions tries to shed some light on broader constitutional and jurisprudential questions, including the distinctly metonymic relationship between the “President” and the rest of the Executive Branch and the complicated connections between judicial reasoning, the exercise of judicial authority, and the identity of the individual judge.

This essay was written as part of symposium marking the hundredth anniversary of the formal institution of Supreme Court law clerks.

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the political dimensions of civil religion in the United States. By employing an original social-psychological theory rooted in semiotics, it offers a qualitative and quantitative empirical examination of more than fifty years of political rhetoric. Further, it presents two in-depth case studies that examine how the cultural, totemic sign of ‘the Founding Fathers’ and the signs of America’s sacred texts (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) are used in attempts to link partisan policy positions with  notions that the country collectively holds sacred. The book’s overarching thesis is that America’ s civil religion serves as a discursive framework for the country’s politics of the sacred, mediating the
demands of particularistic interests and social solidarity through the interaction of social belief and institutional politics like elections and the Supreme Court. The book penetrates America’s unique political religiosity to reveal and unravel the intricate ways in which politics, political institutions, religion and culture intertwine in the United States.

This study presents a brief exploration into the Court constructs its opinions under conditions that favor non-compliance by the executive branch.  Previous research suggests that the Supreme Court behaves differently when the justices have reason to fear that their policies will not be implemented, or implemented unfaithfully, by executive actors.  Another body of research suggests that the Court uses clear language to enhance the chances for compliance when dealing with other government agents, whereas other work suggests that the Court obfuscates its opinion language to protect itself from the political consequences of noncompliance.  I propose to find evidence for these competing theories by using the LIWC content-analysis software of Supreme Court majority opinions in lateral cases.  The evidence I find is mixed between the two theories, but tends to support the clarity model.  I also find evidence that the Court’s opinions reflect awareness of its weakened position in lateral cases, when ideological distance between the Court and President, which favors non-implementation, is high.

Versão pré-print - Artigo a ser publicado.

Resumo: A presente pesquisa busca refletir sobre o seguinte problema: quais as condicionantes normativas históricas do antigo Processo Criminal Brasileiro que influenciam hoje no âmbito da intrincada relação entre os modelos de legislação escrita e do sistema common law no Brasil? Para responder a questão, tem-se os seguintes objetivos: a) tratar das fontes normativas legais, em especial do Decreto 848/1890 e da breve inserção do Brasil no modelo do common law; b) pesquisar as fontes normativas judiciais a partir do Acórdão da ACi nº 745 e Embargos, cujos julgamentos se deram, respectivamente, em 6/8/1902 e 30/7/1904, do Supremo Tribunal Federal; c) verificar as condicionantes levantadas pela Suprema Corte para que se estabelecesse uma orientação common law no sistema jurídico brasileiro. A pesquisa se justifica na medida em que, no Brasil de hoje, é bastante criticada a postura do juiz criador do direito (judge made law), pois conflita com o modelo de legislação escrita, romano-germânico. Embora os críticos possuam certa dose de razão, ignoram, em sua maioria, certas premissas normativas históricas. O método de pesquisa a ser utilizado na investigação é o indutivo, o qual é sequenciado pelo método dialético crítico da história do direito.

Abstract: This research aims to solve the following problem: what are the historical normative constraints of the old Brazilian Criminal Process that influence today's within the scope of the intricate relationship between the models of written legislation and the common law system in Brazil? To answer the question, we have the following objectives: a) to deal with legal normative sources, in particular Decree nº 848/1890, and the brief insertion of Brazil in the common law model; b) search the judicial normative sources from apeal nº 745 and the Embargos, whose judgments were given, respectively, on 6/6/1902 and 7/30/1904, by the Brazilian Supreme Court; c) verify the conditions raised by the Supreme Court to establish a common law orientation in the Brazilian legal system. The paper is justified to the extent that, in Brazil today, the position of the judge who created the law (judge made law) is highly criticized, as it conflicts with the model of written, Roman-Germanic legislation. Although critics have a certain amount of reason,  they mostly ignore certain historical normative premises. The research method to be used in the investigation is the inductive one, which is sequenced by the critical dialectical method of the history of law.

The United States Supreme Court has heard oral arguments in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392 (cert. granted May 17, 2021). During said arguments, by many accounts, the majority of the justices seemed to be showing their cards in favor of a pro-life ruling of some manner. This paper speculates on what pro-life litigation may look like in the future.

FACTS FBI agents suspected Charles Katz of engaging in illegal bookmaking activity; in particular, they thought he was placing bets and transmitting other wagering information by telephone from California to Miami and Boston. Based upon surveillance, the agents learned that Katz made daily calls from one of two adjacent public telephone booths located on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The agents placed recording devices upon those telephone booths in order to record information about the calls which Katz placed to wherever. After obtaining transcripts of the calls placed by Katz from both of the two adjacent telephone booths, federal attorneys used the transcripts of the recorded conversations to obtain an eight-count indictment. ISSUE

Mass media might be enormously persuasive, but people’s principal main way to engage with mass media is passive receptive. According to Leah A. Lievrouw (2011), exposure to or reception of a message might or might not provoke a receiver to act.

The Handmaid’s Tale has inspired protests and became a symbol of resistance. People all over the world are wearing red cloaks and white bonnets to protest various injustices, particularly regarding women’s rights.

Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay beg the question: has the “war on terror” forced liberal democracies to rethink their policies and laws against torture? Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States—two common-law based constitutional democracies—to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies.

Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence—a constantly negotiated process—are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.

In Indonesia, the Supreme Court justices recruitment have suffered from many influences, giving rise to what has been called political bargaining, associated with a member of Parliament, executive government, the supreme court itself, private lawyers, and many other parties who could count on special treatment by “their judges.” Since the changing of political situation mainly indicated by stepping down of Soeharto by people power in 1998, parliament’s role in judicial recruitment is becoming dominant. In 1999, the Constitution Amendment gave the role to the Judicial Commission in order to minimize political intervention. Even so, there are still many problems which arise during the process. The article try to answer the question as to how the recruitment process of the Supreme Court in Indonesia impacts the independence of the judiciary. The analysis in this essay centers on the institutional position of those in charge of selecting judges. Moreover it explores the extent to which other political institutions can influence the recruitment of judges that will affect independence of the judiciary.

Are the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols antiquate regulations, respect the new post-modern warfare methods? What international regulations States and organized armed group must observe, when conducting armed conflicts in a transnational context?
The paper wants to address the issue above, with a tripartite approach: the first section discusses the textual analysis of the Geneva Convention; the second section investigates over two leading cases (USA Supreme Court and ICTR) which extensively offered a legal qualifications to the conducts at stake; in the third section I illuminate the position of the most authoritative scholarship, and finally proposing an original interpretation.

Born to Lead was written to inspire change agents and young activists searching for an authentic story about the fight for social justice and life in public service. It’s a non-conventional case study on the role of culture in America. It explores my personal loss while attending Yale Divinity School and transitions backwards through my professional and academic achievements that include: serving as president of the student divestment movement that convinced the University of Maryland Board of Regents and the state’s eleven campuses to withdraw all holdings from South Africa; encounters living and working in sustainable development (in Benin, West Africa, Haiti, and other countries); and chronicles my rise in political communications having served as director of communications for the second largest polling firm in America during the 2004 presidential election (with partners like NBC’s Meet the Press, Wall Street Journal Online and Reuters Newswire). It’s a fairly short semi-biographic that celebrates the highs and lows of exceptional opportunities and the implicit pressures of being young, black and female in Washington, DC’s political jungle.

This study elaborates a theory of the Court’s responses to the President’s power to control the implementation of its cases. The central idea is that in certain cases, the Court must be aware of how the President and executive branch will implement those cases, and will alter their decision-making ex ante to reduce the probability of disobedience. This study investigates the relationship between three key factors: lateral cases, ideological distance between Court and President, and the President’s involvement through executive orders. The key finding is that even when the President grows ideologically distant from the Court, the Court becomes more likely to rule in the federal government’s favor. This effect is exacerbated by the extent of that distance, and the number of executive orders in a case’s issue areas.

The US media system is primarily a commercial one dominated by a small number of lightly regulated corporations, and offset by weak public alternatives. This was not inevitable ; it resulted from the outcomes of specific policy battles and from specific values triumphing. One way of understanding this logic is to focus on "corporate libertarianism", which emphasizes negative freedoms (freedom from) as opposed to positive ones (freedom for). Historically, much US media law and policy has been framed in negative terms, exemplified by the First Amendment. But there are also largely forgotten traditions that draw from a positive rights discourse. This social democratic orientation privileges media diversity and protects collective rights held by publics, audiences, and communities over the individual rights of corporations. Drawing from historical case studies, this chapter considers media policies for the digital age founded on positive freedoms.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Stephen Breyer hold diverse opinions about whether international treaties should apply to U.S. domestic law. This is a comparison of the views of these two Supreme Court Justices on U.S. treaty agreements and domestic policies.

FACTS: Taking cues from Furman, many states set out to revise their death penalty laws. Among the new plans was one proposed by Georgia (and other states). At the hear of this law was the " bifurcated trial, " which consisted of two stages— the guilt phase and the penalty phase. Under such a system, the trial proceeds as usual, with a jury finding the defendant guilty or not guilty. If the verdict is guilty, the prosecution can seek the death penalty at the penalty stage, in which the defense attorney presents the mitigating facts and the prosecution presents the aggravating facts. Mitigating facts include the individual's record, family responsibility, psychiatric reports, chances for rehabilitation, and age. These factors are not specified in law. The prosecution, however, has to demonstrate that a least one codified aggravating factor was present. The Georgia law specified ten aggravating factors, including murder committed " while the offender was engaged in the commission of another capital offense, " the murder of " a judicial officer…or…district attorney because of the exercise of his official duty, " and murders that are " outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhumane. " After hearing both sides, the jury determines whether the convicted individual receives the death penalty. By spelling out the conditions that must be present before a death penalty can be imposed, the law south to reduce the jury's discretion and eliminate the arbitrary application of the death penalty that the Court found unacceptable in Furman. As a further safeguarded, the Georgia Supreme Court was to review all jury determinations of death. This new law was applied to Try Gregg and was quickly challenged by abolitionist interests. Gregg and a friend were hitchhiking north in Florida. Two men picked them up, and the foursome was later joined by another passenger who rode with them as far as Atlanta, Georgia. The four then continued to a rest top on the highway. The next day, the bodies of the tow drivers were found in a nearby ditch. The individual let off in Atlanta identified Gregg and his friend as possible assailants. Gregg was tried under Georgia's new death penalty system. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, a penalty the states highest court upheld.

The socio-economic classes from which judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court of India are drawn are fairly narrow and unrepresentative of the larger Indian population. The present article looks at data related to all High Court judges serving in 2016 to identify the source of appointment as a potential cause of such lack of diversity.

This book chapter brings to light the enduring impact Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions have had on the world of federal subject-matter jurisdiction. Subject-matter jurisdiction, often described as the “power” of a federal court, has attained a haloed status in federal jurisprudence over the years. I view Ginsburg’s jurisprudence in this area as a multi-pronged and multi-year attempt to desanctify subject-matter jurisdiction. She has led the charge to clarify and narrow when a limit is considered “jurisdictional,” has marshaled unanimous opinions undermining its “fundamental” stature, and has explored ways to “cure” its defects, all in the name of bringing pragmatism and sensibility to jurisdictional doctrine. In exploring these efforts, this chapter makes two contributions. The first is a systematic analysis of Ginsburg’s role — both as judge and justice — in pushing changes in jurisdictionality. The second is to offer some evaluative observations — mostly laudatory with a few gentle criticisms — of her efforts. Ultimately, I hope to illuminate this largely overshadowed area and give credit to the jurist whom I see as primarily responsible for its modern development.