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Full-Text Articles in Law
Free Expression, In-Group Bias, And The Court's Conservatives: A Critique Of The Epstein-Parker-Segal Study, Todd E. Pettys
Free Expression, In-Group Bias, And The Court's Conservatives: A Critique Of The Epstein-Parker-Segal Study, Todd E. Pettys
Todd E. Pettys
In a recent, widely publicized study, a prestigious team of political scientists concluded that there is strong evidence of ideological in-group bias among the Supreme Court’s members in First Amendment free-expression cases, with the current four most conservative justices being the Roberts Court’s worst offenders. Beneath the surface of the authors’ conclusions, however, one finds a surprisingly sizable combination of coding errors, superficial case readings, and questionable judgments about litigants’ ideological affiliations. Many of those problems likely flow either from shortcomings that reportedly afflict the Supreme Court Database (the data set that nearly always provides the starting point for empirical …
High Court Pretense, Lower Court Candor: Judicial Impartiality After Capterton V. Massey Coal Co., Lynne H. Rambo
High Court Pretense, Lower Court Candor: Judicial Impartiality After Capterton V. Massey Coal Co., Lynne H. Rambo
Faculty Scholarship
Apolitical, impartial judging has always been our judicial ideal. In the last twenty years, however, special interest groups have sought power over (and through) judges by pouring millions into judicial elections, and the Court has recognized their first amendment right to do so. In the midst of this politicization of judicial elections, the Court five years ago reinforced the impartiality ideal, holding very broadly in Caperton v. Massey Coal Co. that it violates due process for a judge to sit whenever there is a “probability of bias,” i.e., whenever the average judge is unlikely to be neutral. Caperton involved a …