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Full-Text Articles in Law
Institutional Rules, Strategic Behavior And The Legacy Of Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Setting The Record Straight On Dickerson V. United States, Daniel Katz
Daniel M Katz
Why did Justice Rehnquist behave the way he did in Dickerson v. United States? As written, many prevailing accounts accept Justice Rehnquist's opinion in Dickerson v. United States at face value and disavow the potential of a strategic explanation. The difficulty with the non-strategic accounts is their failure to outline explicitly the evidence supporting the uniqueness of their theory. Specifically, these explanations largely ignore the alternative set of preferences which could have produced the Chief's decision. This is troubling because prior scholarship demonstrates that a chief justice possesses a unique set of institutional powers which provides significant incentive for him …
The Second Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Joshua B. Fischman, Tonja Jacobi
The Second Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Joshua B. Fischman, Tonja Jacobi
Tonja Jacobi
Describing the justices of the Supreme Court as ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ has become so standard—and the left-right division on the Court is considered so entrenched—that any deviation from that pattern is treated with surprise. Attentive Court watchers know that the justices are not just politicians in robes, deciding each case on a purely ideological basis. Yet the increasingly influential empirical legal studies literature assumes just that—that a left-right ideological dimension fully describes the Supreme Court. We show that there is a second, more legally-focused dimension of judicial decision-making. A continuum between legalism and pragmatism also divides the justices, in ways …