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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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American Politics

Honors Scholar Theses

Supreme Court

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

What Does It Take? The Informal Factors That Are Conducive To The Passage Of A Participatory Amendment, Connor Huydic May 2020

What Does It Take? The Informal Factors That Are Conducive To The Passage Of A Participatory Amendment, Connor Huydic

Honors Scholar Theses

Hundreds of Constitutional revisions are proposed in our national legislature every year, yet only twenty-seven have been ratified as amendments in the 243-year history of the United States. The Constitution outlines the formal factors required to ratify an amendment, but this paper will focus on the informal factors that are integral to the eventual passage of a participatory amendment. Through case studies of the Nineteenth and Twenty-Sixth Amendments, this thesis examines the factors that contributed to the ratification of these amendments to find similarities in the circumstances that helped propel these bills to eventual adoption as amendments. Non-radical social movements, …


Perpetual Conflict Or Compromise? The Cost Of Domestic Legitimacy In The Realm Of Women's Human Rights: A Case Study On The Right To An Abortion, Kim Andrea Kelly Dec 2008

Perpetual Conflict Or Compromise? The Cost Of Domestic Legitimacy In The Realm Of Women's Human Rights: A Case Study On The Right To An Abortion, Kim Andrea Kelly

Honors Scholar Theses

With its turbulent and volatile legal evolution, the right to an abortion in the United States still remains a highly contested issue and has developed into one of the most divisive topics within modern legal discourse. By deconstructing the political underpinnings and legal rationale of the right to an abortion through a systematic case law analysis, I will demonstrate that this right has been incrementally destabilized. This instability embedded in abortion jurisprudence has been primarily produced by a combination of textual ambiguity in the case law and judicial ambivalence regarding this complex area of law. In addition, I argue that …