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Full-Text Articles in Models and Methods
'It Wasn't Supposed To Be Easy': What The Founders Originally Intended For The Senate's 'Advice And Consent' Role For Supreme Court Confirmation Processes, Michael W. Wilt
Channels: Where Disciplines Meet
The Founders exerted significant energy and passion in formulating the Appointments Clause, which greatly impacts the role of the Senate and the President in appointing Supreme Court Justices. The Founders, through their understanding of human nature, devised the power to be both a check by the U.S. Senate on the President's nomination, and a concurrent power through joint appointment authority. The Founders initially adopted the Senate election mode via state legislatures as a means of insulation from majoritarian passions of the people too. This paper seeks to understand the Founders envisioning for the Senate's 'Advice and Consent' role as it …
Judicial Choice Among Cases For Certiorari, Tonja Jacobi, Álvaro Bustos
Judicial Choice Among Cases For Certiorari, Tonja Jacobi, Álvaro Bustos
Faculty Articles
How does the Supreme Court choose among cases to grant cert? In a model with a strategic Supreme Court, a continuum of rule-following lower courts, a set of potential cases for revision, and a distribution of future lower court cases, we show that the Court takes the case that will most significantly shape future lower court case outcomes in the direction that the Court prefers. That is, the Court grants cert to the case with maximum salience. If the Court is rather liberal (or conservative), then the most salient case is that which moves the discretionary range of the legal …
Taking Laughter Seriously At The Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag
Taking Laughter Seriously At The Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag
Faculty Articles
Laughter in Supreme Court oral arguments has been misunderstood, treated as either a lighthearted distraction from the Court’s serious work, or interpreted as an equalizing force in an otherwise hierarchical environment. Examining the more than nine thousand instances of laughter witnessed at the Court since 1955, this Article shows that the Justices of the Supreme Court use courtroom humor as a tool of advocacy and a signal of their power and status. As the Justices have taken on a greater advocacy role in the modern era, they have also provoked more laughter.
The performative nature of courtroom humor is apparent …