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Judge Not - Why Won’T Progressives Fight For Federal Judges?, Sonja R. West Oct 2011

Judge Not - Why Won’T Progressives Fight For Federal Judges?, Sonja R. West

Popular Media

Democrats have taken their eye off the ball on judicial appointments for far too long. It took decades for Republicans to build the court system now in place, and it may take many years to rebalance it. But the time to start is yesterday. Until Democrats start slapping “It’s the courts, stupid!” stickers on their rear bumpers, their elected officials aren’t going to change. Until progressives say, “I’m not going to stop writing my senator until Paul Watford gets a hearing,” Obama judges will be slow-walked through hearings and wait months for a floor vote that might never come. We …


Samantar And Executive Power, Peter B. Rutledge Oct 2011

Samantar And Executive Power, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

This essay examines Samantar v. Yousuf in the context of broader debate about the relationship between federal common law and executive power. Samantar represents simply the latest effort by the Executive Branch to literally shape the meaning of law through a process referred to in the literature as “executive lawmaking.” While traditional accounts of executive lawmaking typically have treated the idea as a singular concept, Samantar demonstrates the need to bifurcate the concept into at least two different categories: acts of executive lawmaking decoupled from pending litigation and acts of executive lawmaking taken expressly in response to litigation. As Samantar …


May It Please The Senate: An Empirical Analysis Of The Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings Of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009, Lori A. Ringhand, Paul M. Collins Jr. Feb 2011

May It Please The Senate: An Empirical Analysis Of The Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings Of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009, Lori A. Ringhand, Paul M. Collins Jr.

Scholarly Works

This paper examines the questions asked and answers given by every Supreme Court nominee who has appeared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1939. In doing so, it uses a new dataset developed by the authors. This database, which provides a much-needed empirical foundation for scholarship in emerging areas of constitutional law and political science, captures all of the statements made at the hearings and codes these comments by issue area, subissue area, party of the appointing president, and party of the questioning senator. The dataset allows us to quantify for the fist time such things as which …


Wilderness, The Courts And The Effect Of Politics On Judicial Decisionmaking, Peter A. Appel Jan 2011

Wilderness, The Courts And The Effect Of Politics On Judicial Decisionmaking, Peter A. Appel

Scholarly Works

Empirical analyses of cases from federal courts have attempted to determine the effect of judges’ political ideology on their decisions. This question holds interest for scholars from many disciplines. Investigating judicial review of the actions of administrative agencies should provide strong evidence on the question of political influence because applicable rules of judicial deference to administrative decisions ought to lead judges to reach politically neutral results. Yet several studies have found a strong correlation between results in these cases and proxies for political ideology. Cases involving the interpretation of environmental law have been of particular interest as a subset of …