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An Empirical Analysis Of The Confirmation Hearings Of The Justices Of The Rehnquist Natural Court, Jason J. Czarnezki, William K. Ford, Lori A. Ringhand
An Empirical Analysis Of The Confirmation Hearings Of The Justices Of The Rehnquist Natural Court, Jason J. Czarnezki, William K. Ford, Lori A. Ringhand
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The interpretive or judicial philosophies of Supreme Court Justices can be thought of as “packages of beliefs” about how to interpret the law, packages that go by names like formalism, originalism, and textualism. Given the reasonable assumption that a judge's judicial philosophy could matter for how he or she will decide cases, the judicial philosophy of a nominee to the Supreme Court is of great interest to members of the Senate who vote on a nominee's confirmation. Figuring out a nominee's judicial philosophy is, consequently, one purpose of the confirmation hearings in the Senate, and Senators often claim to base …
Judicial Activism: An Empirical Examination Of Voting Behavior On The Rehnquist Natural Court, Lori A. Ringhand
Judicial Activism: An Empirical Examination Of Voting Behavior On The Rehnquist Natural Court, Lori A. Ringhand
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This paper attempts to quantify one of the most deeply contested terms in constitutional law: “judicial activism.” Most discussions of “judicial activism” define activism either in reference to a particular political ideology (such as complaints about “liberal activist judges”) or a particular method of constitutional interpretation (such as assertions that a decision was “activist” because it was not based on the original meaning of the Constitution). This paper sidesteps those debates, focusing instead on an empirical examination of how recent U.S. Supreme Court justices have in fact exercised their judicial power. I do this by examining the voting records of …
The Rehnquist Court: A "By The Numbers" Retrospective, Lori A. Ringhand
The Rehnquist Court: A "By The Numbers" Retrospective, Lori A. Ringhand
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The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over the U.S. Supreme Court for nineteen years, longer than any other Chief Justice in the 20th century. Despite this longevity, however, there is little consensus on just what the legacy of the Rehnquist Court is. Was the Rehnquist Court a restrained Court that embraced a limited, text-based reading of the Constitution? Or was it a much more aggressive Court, responsible for a resurgence of conservative judicial activism? Is it best epitomized by the “swaggering confidence” that put a President in office, or the cautious minimalism that disappointed its conservative supporters by failing …
The Rehnquist Court, Structural Due Process, And Semisubstantive Constitutional Review, Dan T. Coenen
The Rehnquist Court, Structural Due Process, And Semisubstantive Constitutional Review, Dan T. Coenen
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Semisubstantive review, as I use that label, entails four key features. First, the subject matter of judicial inquiry is not the process applied in adjudicating a discrete dispute; rather, the matter at hand is the constitutionality of a statute or other generalized expression of legal policy. Second, some procedural omission by the lawmaker -- rather than an incurably substantive flaw in the end product of its work -- lays the groundwork for a judicial intervention that invalidates the challenged rule or negates how that rule otherwise would operate. It may be, for example, that a federal statute read as a …