Law and Politics Commons^™

Random Chance Or Loaded Dice: The Politics Of Judicial Designation, Todd C. Peppers, Katherine Vigilante, Christopher Zorn

Scholarly Articles

Here, we take advantage of a unique characteristic of the procedures of the U.S. courts of appeals—the discretion held by chief judges to designate district court judges to three-judge appellate panels— to examine empirically the importance of oversight and judicial hierarchy on judges' behavior in those courts. Specifically, we examine the extent to which decisions about the policy preferences of designated judges vary systematically with the ideological tenor of the chief judge himself, the court as a whole, and the U.S. Supreme Court. More simply put, we ask: are district court judges selected to sit on appeals court panels simply …

Toward A Meaning-Full Establishment Clause Neutrality, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Open Secret: Why The Supreme Court Has Nothing To Fear From The Internet, Keith J. Bybee

Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media at Syracuse University

The United States Supreme Court has an uneasy relationship with openness: it complies with some calls for transparency, drags its feet in response to others, and sometimes simply refuses to go along. I argue that the Court’s position is understandable given that the internet age of fluid information and openness has often been heralded in terms that are antithetical to the Court’s operations. Even so, I also argue the Court actually has little to fear from greater transparency. The understanding of the Court with the greatest delegitimizing potential is the understanding that the justices render decisions on the basis of …

The Possibility Of Compromise: Antiabortion Moderates After Roe V. Wade, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Did Roe v. Wade destroy the possibility for compromise in the abortion debate? Leading studies argue that Roe itself radicalized debate and marginalized antiabortion moderates, either by issuing a sweeping decision before adequate public support had developed or by framing the opinion in terms of moral absolutes. Others rely on this history in criticizing the sweeping privacy framework set out in Roe, attributing the radicalization of the general discussion and the antiabortion movement to the timing, reach, or framing of the abortion right in the opinion.

The polarization narrative on which leading studies rely obscures important actors and arguments that …

Robert Taylor, An Appreciation, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Political Hot Potato: How Closing Loopholes Can Get Policymakers Cooked, Stephanie Mcmahon

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Loopholes in the law are weaknesses that allow the law to be circumvented. Once created, they prove hard to eliminate. Acase study of the evolving tax unit used in the federal income tax explores policymakers' response to loopholes. The1913 income tax created an opportunity for wealthy married couples to shift ownership of family income between spouses, then to file separately, and, as a result, to reduce their collective taxes. In 1948, Congress closed this loophole by extending the income-splitting benefit to all married taxpayers filing jointly. Congress acted only after the federal judiciary and Treasury Department pleaded for congressional …

Our Generation's Sputnik Moment: Regulating Energy Innovation, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama stressed the necessity of innovation as the key to unlocking our economic future. More pointedly, he stated that now is "our generation's Sputnik moment." Just as the United States responded to national security threats posed by a cold war Russia, today we must respond to threats to our economy and our environment, as well as to our national security, posed by an oil addiction that we have not been able to break for over half a century. The intertwined needs to provide sufficient energy, environmental protection, and a vibrant economy …

From 1994 To 2011: Are San Francisco Commissions More Representative?, Maria X. Martinez, Esin Nacar, Aimee Nichols

McCarthy Center Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hunger And U.S. Governmental Policies, Evangelical Advocacy: A Response To Global Poverty

Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

The Joireman Collection, Evangelical Advocacy: A Response To Global Poverty

Bibliographies

The Joireman collection is a list of bibliographic resources gathered by political scientists to examine the relationship between religion and politics as seen from within several Christian traditions: Evangelical, Pentecostals, Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic. The list comes from the book Church, State, and Citizen: Christian Approaches to Political Engagement edited and contributed by Sandra F. Joireman.

Fill The Bench And Empty The Docket: Filibuster Reform For District Court Nominations, Jeremy Garson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Judges are, without question, vital to our justice system. They interpret, adapt, and apply the law. They resolve disputes for the parties to the case at issue and provide guidance to others in analogous situations. They are the gears that keep the wheels of justice moving. Unfortunately, in the case of our federal courts, many of these gears are missing. Eighty-three of our 874 federal judgeships are vacant, including thirty-four that have been declared “judicial emergencies.” Our Constitution vests the President with the power to nominate federal judges and the Senate with the power to confirm or reject them, and …

Legal Affinities: Explorations In The Legal Form Of Thought, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

This is my Introduction to Legal Affinities: Explorations in the Legal Form of Thought (forthcoming 2012) (co-edited with H. Jefferson Powell and Jack Sammons), a volume of essays dedicated to exploring the work of Joseph Vining. The Introduction introduces Vining’s phenomenology of law and surveys the themes and topics developed by the volume’s eight authors: Joseph Vining, Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., Rev. John McCausland, H. Jefferson Powell, Jack Sammons, Steve Smith, James Boyd White, and Patrick Brennan.

Remembering Camelot: Recent Adventures In Economy, Law And Politics, John Henry Schlegel

Other Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Free Speech For Judges And Due Process For Litigants: The Elimination Of First And Fourteenth Amendment Mutual Exclusivity In Siefert V. Alexander, 46 J. Marshall L. Rev. 333 (2012), Margaret Mares

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Congress In Court, Amanda Frost

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption.

The federal judiciary’s approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation diminishes Congress’s influence, often to the benefit of the executive branch. The rise of textualism, the canon of constitutional avoidance, the reliance on Chevron deference, and the courts’ reluctance to second-guess …

Feminism In The Global Political Economy: Contradiction And Consensus In Cuba, Deborah M. Weissman

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Party Democrats Need Popular Democracy And Popular Democrats Need Parties , Ethan J. Leib, Christopher S. Elmendorf

Faculty Scholarship

Too often, popular political power-whether it is in the form of direct democracy or other more innovative forays in participatory or deliberative democracy-presents itself principally as a counterweight to the political power parties wield. Yet setting up "popular democracy" and '"party democracy" in opposition to one another in the American political landscape is not only unnecessary but also pathological: this oppositional posture risks the ossification of party democracy and keeps popular democrats insulated from the substantial improvements the power of parties could bring to the polity. This Article, accordingly, seeks to enrich both party democracy and popular democracy by showing …

Gentle Into That Good Night: Subsidy Expiration Provides A Lesson In Reform Through Inactions, Max Bulinksi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

After thirty years, Congress let the federal subsidy for corn-based ethanol expire on December 31, 2011. Although the influence of “Big Corn” is not as ubiquitously known as that of “Big Oil” or pharmaceuticals, the agricultural sector is consistently ranked among the top sectors for lobbying expenditures. This political clout is well demonstrated by the extent of the former subsidy. The ethanol subsidy has been in existence for the last thirty years and cost taxpayers roughly six billion dollars in each recent year.

Deruglatory Riders Redux, Thomas O, Mcgarity

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Soon after the 2010 elections placed the Republican Party in control of the House of Representatives, the House took up a number of deregulatory bills. Recognizing that deregulatory legislation had little chance of passing the Senate, which remained under the control of the Democratic Party, or of being signed by President Obama, the House leadership reprised a strategy adopted by the Republican leaders during the 104th Congress in the 1990s. The deregulatory provisions were attached as riders to much-needed legislation in an attempt to force the Senate and the President to accept the deregulatory riders to avoid the adverse consequences …

The $1.75 Trillion Lie, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

A 2010 study commissioned by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration claims that federal regulations impose annual economic costs of $1.75 trillion. This estimate has been widely circulated, in everything from op-ed pages to Congressional testimony. But the estimate is not credible. For costs of economic regulations, the estimate reflects a calculation that rests on a misunderstanding of the definition of the relevant data, flunks an elementary question on the normal distribution, pads the analysis with several years of near-identical data, and fails to recognize the difference between correlation and causation. For costs of environmental regulation, …