Law Commons^™

Naming Names: The Impact Of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution On Citizen Assessment Of Policy Outcomes, Scott S. Boddery, Laura P. Moyer, Jeff Yates

Political Science Faculty Publications

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people …

Research Offers Tough Love To Improve Human Rights Practices, Joel Pruce

Political Science Faculty Publications

We know what it means to practice a skill such as juggling or dancing, but what does it mean to "practice" human rights?

Contributions to OpenGlobalRights (OGR), since its inception, have gravitated around critique of human rights practices by focusing on advocacy and activism, cultivating debates that address the contemporary dilemmas facing human rights movements worldwide. The launch of OGR four years ago is a symptom of what I’ve referred to elsewhere as a “practice turn” in the scholarly field of human rights—one that takes human rights practice as its subject, forges space for scholar-practitioner collaboration and communication, and focuses …

Introduction: Symposium On The Social Practice Of Human Rights, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This volume of Public Integrity presents a symposium of five articles related to human rights that (a) introduce readers to the general origin and nature of human rights conversation, (b) characterize how these norms are conveyed in the current digital age, or (c) depict how local governments and nonprofit agencies confront matters of human rights. Nonetheless, in publishing this symposium, PI “pushes the envelope” in asserting that human rights questions legitimately qualify as matters germane to the study and practice of public administration. Readers could, after all, maintain that, notwithstanding the aspirational appeal of human rights, international norms fall well …

Administrative Narratives, Human Rights, And Public Ethics: The Detroit Water-Shutoff Case, Richard K. Ghere

Political Science Faculty Publications

This inquiry focuses specifically on administrative (local official) narratives that speak to contentious issue contexts of social conflict. Specifically, it draws upon a theoretical connection between hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge to interpret narrative passages of local officials and others related to a contentious public action—the Detroit Water and Sewerage District’s stepped-up water-discontinuation efforts (2014 and 2015) that left thousands of inner-city residents with “delinquent” accounts and no access to water service. Selected narratives from this case are interpreted on the basis of their literary and social functions. The interpretations support a subsequent determination of whether and how the …

Hopeful Losers? A Moral Case For Mixed Electoral Systems, Loren King

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberal democracies encourage citizen participation and protect our freedoms, yet these regimes elect politicians and decide important issues with electoral and legislative systems that are less inclusive than other arrangements. Some citizens inevitably have more influence than others. Is this a problem? Yes, because similarly just but more inclusive systems are possible. Political theorists and philosophers should be arguing for particular institutional forms, with particular geographies, consistent with justice.

Les démocraties libérales encouragent la participation citoyenne et protègent nos libertés. Pourtant, ces régimes élisent des politiciens et décident de problèmes importants via les systèmes électoral et législatif, qui sont moins …

Compared To What? Judicial Review And Other Veto Points In Contemporary Political Theory, David Watkins, Scott E. Lemieux

Political Science Faculty Publications

Many democratic and jurisprudential theorists have too often uncritically accepted Alexander Bickel’s notion of “the countermajoritarian difficulty” when considering the relationship between judicial review and democracy; this is the case for arguments both for and against judicial review. This framework is both theoretically and empirically unsustainable. Democracy is not wholly synonymous with majoritarianism, and judicial review is not inherently countermajoritarian in the first place.

In modern democratic political systems, judicial review is one of many potential veto points. Since all modern democratic political systems contain veto points, the relevant and unexplored question is what qualities might make a veto point …

Transitions From War To Peace, Caroline A. Hartzell

Political Science Faculty Publications

The Elgar Handbook of Civil War and Fragile States brings together contributions from a multidisciplinary group of internationally renowned scholars on such important issues as the causes of violent conflicts and state fragility, the challenges of conflict resolution and mediation, and the obstacles to post-conflict reconstruction and durable peace-building. This chapter examines the state of current knowledge regarding transitions from war to peace following civil wars.

The Judicial Transformation Of Social Security Disability: The Case Of Mental Disorders And Childhood Disability, Jennifer L. Erkulwater

Political Science Faculty Publications

A full account of the judicial influence on Social Security disability programs would require a book-length, perhaps even encyclopedia-length, treatise and would take us far afield from our present concern. This article focuses narrowly on the activities of Legal Services attorneys, mental health reformers, and children's advocates. Although mental health reformer groups are only one of many antipoverty organizations involved in advocacy efforts on behalf of the disabled poor, they have been among the most persistent, the most active, and the most successful in using a litigation strategy to achieve their larger policy goals. According to one Social Security official, …