Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Mandatory Guidelines: The Oxymoronic State Of Sentencing After United States V. Booker, Hon. Graham C. Mullen, J. P. Davis

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

"The Stepford Justices": The Need For Experiential Diversity On The Roberts Court, 60 Okla. L. Rev. 701 (2007), Timothy P. O'Neill

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lincoln And Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, And The President's War Powers, James F. Simon

Books

The clashes between President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney over slavery, secession, and the president's constitutional war powers went to the heart of Lincoln's presidency. James Simon, author of the acclaimed What Kind of Nation, brings to vivid life the passionate struggle during the worst crisis in the nation's history, the Civil War. The issues that underlaid that crisis -- race, states' rights, and the president's wartime authority -- resonate today in the nation's political debate.

Ideological Drift Among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, And How Important?, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn, Jeffrey A. Segal

Faculty Articles

After reviewing the relevant commentary in Part II, we deploy state-of-the ­art methods to address these questions. The results, as it turns out, could not be clearer: contrary to the received wisdom, virtually every Justice serving since the 1930s has moved to the left or right or, in some cases, has switched directions several times.

Finding that ideological drift is pervasive, in Part IV we develop the implications of our results for two moments in the Justices' career cycle: the events surrounding their appointments to the Court and the doctrine they develop once confirmed. As to the first, we show …

The Double Standard In Judicial Selection, Edwin Meese Iii

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Where Do We Draw The Line?: The Justiciability Of Political Gerrymandering Claims In Light Of League Of United Latin American Citizens V. Perry, Matthew M. Weiss

Georgia Law Review

Ever since the Supreme Court decided Baker v. Carr in 1962, there has been an evolving debate in the legal community over whether political gerrymandering could ever become so egregious that it would constitute a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. This Note discusses how the Court's recent case, League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, sheds new light on whether political gerrymandering is a non-justiciable political question. The Note argues that a majority of the Court now appears to have adopted Justice Kennedy's "wait-and-see" approach from his concurrence in Vieth v. Jubelirer, which accepts that a judicially manageable …

Reviving The Right To Vote, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Losers in partisan districting battles have long challenged the resulting districting plans under seemingly unrelated legal doctrines. They have filed lawsuits alleging malapportionment, racial gerrymandering, and racial vote dilution, and they periodically prevail. Many election law scholars worry about these lawsuits, claiming that they needlessly "racialize" fundamentally political disputes, distort important legal doctrines designed for other purposes, and provide an inadequate remedy for a fundamentally distinct electoral problem. I am not convinced. This Article argues that the application of distinct doctrines to invalidate or diminish what are indisputably partisan gerrymanders is not necessarily problematic, and that the practice may well …

Race-Conscious Student Assignment Plans: Balkanization, Integration, And Individualized Consideration, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In deciding Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court of the United States will likely confront a critical issue to emerge from the lower court opinions on voluntary integration plans: whether school districts that use race as a factor in student assignment must comply with a legal requirement of individualized consideration. The Court has imposed such a requirement in other contexts, but it has not clearly explained what the concept of individualized consideration means and why particular forms of it matter.

This Article clarifies the …

First Principles For Virginia's Fifth Century, Hon. Robert F. Mcdonnell

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Commandeering And Its Alternatives: A Federalism Perspective, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This inquiry argues that current Tenth Amendment jurisprudence causes net harm to federalism values under certain circumstances. Specifically, New York v. United States and Printz v. United States protect state autonomy to some extent by requiring the federal government to internalize more of the costs of federal regulation before engaging in regulation, and by addressing any accountability problems that commandeering can cause. But anticommandeering doctrine harms state autonomy in situations where the presence of the rule triggers more preemption going forward. Preemption generally causes a greater compromise of federalism values than does commandeering by eroding state regulatory control.

While it …

Self-Defeating Minimalism, Adam B. Cox

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Everyone wants a piece of Tom DeLay. The former majority leader is under investigation and indictment, and even the Supreme Court threatened last Term to undo one of his signal achievements. In 2003, DeLay orchestrated a highly unusual mid-decade revision of Texas’s congressional map. The revised map was a boon to Republicans, shifting the Texas congressional delegation from 15 Republicans and 17 Democrats to 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats. The map was attacked as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear those challenges in LULAC v. Perry, many …

Cultural Compactness, Daniel R. Oritz

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The Supreme Court’s opinions in LULAC v. Perry, the Texas redistricting case, confounded expectation. While many believed that the Court would develop the law governing partisan gerrymandering in one direction or another, it did not. As exactly before, such claims are justiciable but there is no law to govern them. In other words, the courthouse doors are open, but until some plaintiff advances a novel theory persuasive to five justices, no claims will succeed. On the other hand, few expected the Court to make any major changes to doctrine under the Voting Rights Act and Shaw v. Reno. But LULAC …

This Way To The Egress And Other Reflections On Partisan Gerrymandering Claims In Light Of Lulac V. Perry, Bernard Grofman

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

After winning control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship, Texas Republicans eventually succeeded in redistricting Texas’s congressional seats in 2003, replacing a 2001 court-drawn plan. LULAC v. Perry reviewed a number of challenges to that second redistricting. The decision deals with a multiplicity of issues, including, most importantly, the standard for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the nature of tests for unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. While there are some clear holdings in the case, several of them reflect different combinations of Justices in the majority and, since there are six different opinions, it …

Anthony Kennedy's Blind Quest, Scot Powe, Steve Bickerstaff

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

League of United Latin American Citizens [LULAC] v. Perry embraced, in the context of partisan gerrymandering, Felix Frankfurter’s conclusion that the Supreme Court should not enter the political thicket of legislative apportionment. Two years earlier in Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Court split 4–1–4 on the justiciability of partisan gerrymandering. O’Conner and the three conservatives held it was nonjusticiable. Each of the four moderate liberals offered a test showing it was justiciable. Kennedy dissented from the conservatives while simultaneously rejecting each of the four tests offered. He announced he was waiting for a better test. When far superior tests were offered …

Lulac On Partisan Gerrymandering: Some Clarity, More Uncertainty, Richard Briffault

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

In League of United Latin American Citizens (“LULAC”) v. Perry, the Supreme Court, for the second time in two years, agonized over partisan gerrymandering. LULAC’s rejection of a Democratic challenge to the Texas legislature’s mid-decade pro-Republican congressional redistricting resembles the Court’s 2004 dismissal of a Democratic gerrymandering suit against Pennsylvania’s pro-Republican congressional redistricting plan in Vieth v. Jubelirer. As in Vieth, the Justices wrangled over justiciability, the substantive standard for assessing the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering claims, and the interplay of justiciability and constitutionality. As in Vieth, the Court was highly fragmented: Vieth produced five separate opinions, while LULAC took …

Strict In Theory, Loopy In Fact, Nathaniel Persily

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Most Supreme Court-watchers find the decision in LULAC v. Perry notable for the ground it breaks concerning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the ground it refuses to break on the topic of partisan gerrymandering. I tend to think the Court’s patchwork application of Section 2 to strike down a district on vote dilution grounds is not all that dramatic, nor is its resolution of the partisan gerrymandering claims all that surprising. The truly unprecedented development in the case for me was Justice Scalia’s vote to uphold what he considered a racial classification under the Equal Protection Clause, …

Foreword, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

LULAC v. Perry held that Texas violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it displaced nearly 100,000 Latino residents from a congressional district in Laredo to protect the Republican incumbent they refused to support. At the same time, the Justices let stand the dismantling of a so-called “coalition” district in Fort Worth where African-American voters comprising a minority of the district’s population allegedly enjoyed effective control in deciding the district’s representative. Only Justice Kennedy supported the outcome in both Laredo and Fort Worth. His opinion marks the first time that he, or indeed a majority of the Justices, …

Judicial Confirmation Wars: Ideology And The Battle For The Federal Courts, Sheldon Goldman

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just Blowing Smoke? Politics, Doctrine, And The Federalist Revival After Gonzales V. Raich, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judging Partisan Gerrymanders Under The Elections Clause, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Twice in the last two decades, the Supreme Court has come within two votes of declaring partisan gerrymandering – the manipulation of district lines for partisan ends – a nonjusticiable political question. Last Term, in Vieth v. Jubelirer, Pennsylvania Democrats challenged an alleged Republican gerrymander of the state's congressional districts. Four members of the Court thought the question nonjusticiable, and one, Justice Kennedy, thought it justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause but nonetheless rejected the plaintiffs claims. Eighteen years earlier, in Davis v. Bandemer, a three-Justice plurality had held that a political group complaining of partisan gerrymandering – the Democratic …

The Personality Of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Aubrey Immelman, Jamie Thielman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of an indirect assessment of the personality of U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas, from the conceptual perspective of Theodore Millon.

Information concerning Justice Thomas was collected from biographical sources, speeches, and published reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the second edition of the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with Axis II of DSM-IV.

The personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed on the basis of interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality Styles manuals. Justice …

Hope On Consent Decrees, David Schoenbrod, Ross Sandler

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Justice White And Judicial Review, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Expression: Economic Liberty, Political Factions And The Forgotten First Amendment Legacy Of Justice George Sutherland, 10 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 249 (2002), Samuel R. Olken

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In The Business of Expression: Economic Liberty, Political Factions And The Forgotten First Amendment Legacy of Justice George Sutherland, Samuel Olken traces the dichotomy that emerged in constitutional law in the aftermath of the Lochner era between economic liberty and freedom of expression. During the 1930s, while a deeply divided United States Supreme Court adopted a laissez faire approach to economic regulation, it viewed with great suspicion laws that restricted the manner and content of expression. During this period, Justice George Sutherland often clashed with the majority consistently insisting that state regulation of private economic rights bear a close and …

Judicial Activism And Conservative Politics, Ernest A. Young

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is There A Distinctive Conservative Jurisprudence?, The Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The New Deal ‘Constitutional Revolution’ As An Historical Problem, Edward A. Purcell Jr.

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

An "Effective Death Penalty"? Aedpa And Error Detection In Capital Cases, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

On June 11, 2001, the United States of America executed Timothy McVeigh. Dwarfed among the many unspeakable evils that Mr. McVeigh wrought is a speakable one I will address here, namely, the so-called Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA").

Abbreviated, AEDPA's political history is as follows: In November 1994, the "Gingrich Congress" was elected on its Contract with America platform. One of the planks of that platform – one of the few that actually ended up passing Congress – was the so-called "Effective Death Penalty Act." That proposal had little to do with the death penalty and, …

Trying To Make Peace With Bush V. Gore (Symposium: Bush V. Gore Issue 2001), Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, shutting down the recounts of Florida's vote in the 2000 presidential election and effectively awarding the election to George W. Bush, has struck many observers, including myself, as outrageous.' Decisions of the Supreme Court should be more than mere reflections of ideological or partisan preference thinly camouflaged behind legalistic language. It would therefore be pleasant to be able to believe that they are more than that. Accordingly, Judge Richard Posner's analysis,2 in which he defends the result reached by the Court-though not the path by which it got there-is particularly welcome. Though …