Law Commons^™

The Judicial Behavior Of Justice Souter In Criminal Cases And The Denial Of A Conservative Counterrevolution, Scott P. Johnson

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “The following article documents the judicial career of Justice David Souter from his time served as an attorney general and state judge in New Hampshire until his recent tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon his written opinions and individual votes, Justice Souter clearly has evolved into a more liberal jurist than ideological conservatives would have preferred in the area of criminal justice. Over the course of his judicial career, Justice Souter has gained respect as an intellectual scholar by attempting to completely understand both sides of a dispute and applying precedent and legal rules in a flexible—albeit …

Judgments Of The United States Supreme Court And The South African Constitutional Court As A Basis For A Universal Method To Resolve Conflicts Between Fundamental Rights, Daniel H. Erskine

Daniel H. Erskine

This article describes the methods utilized by the United States Supreme Court to resolve specific cases involving conflicts between federal constitutional rights, a federal constitutional right and a state constitutional or statutory right, and an international treaty right and a federal constitutional right. Consideration of particular decisions representative of the manner the Court resolves conflicts between rights in the three typologies described above, illustrates how the Court views such conflicts and the rationales employed to resolve apparent conflicting rights. The rationales used by the United States Supreme Court are compared to the South African Constitutional Court’s decisions in the Soobramoney, …

Super Medians, Lee Epstein, Tonja Jacobi

Faculty Articles

It is not surprising that virtually all analyses of the Supreme Court stress the crucial role played by the swing, pivotal, or median Justice: in theory, the median should be quite powerful. In practice, however, some are far stronger than others. Just as there are “super precedents” and “super statutes”—those that are weightier or more entrenched than others—there are “super medians”—Justices so powerful that they are able to exercise significant control over the outcome and content of the Court’s decisions.

Conventional wisdom holds that Justices accumulate power by virtue of their personality, methodological approach, or even background characteristics. But our …