Suchergebnisse

Scholars of judicial behavior have persuasively demonstrated that parties profoundly influence the elaboration of judicial doctrine, but have paid more limited attention to understanding how courts can transform the content of party agendas. In this article, I argue that judges can work to deliberately define the issue positions adopted by the political parties with which they are affiliated. I contend that judges can, like other political actors, use the tools of their office to further explicitly partisan goals. Although they may employ traditional modes of legal reasoning, judges may nevertheless craft their decisions in ways that prioritize certain party principles over others, interpret the law in ways that knit together the beliefs of divergent factions within their party coalition, articulate principles to guide the party's incorporation of new issues, and, in some instances, begin to outline a coherent ideological vision for the party. I develop this theory through a close examination of theSlaughterhouse Cases, regularly cited as a core building block of the American constitutional canon.

The central claim of this dissertation is that organized business's rise to political power and its variable relationship with the Republican Party are tightly linked. Indeed, I argue that business's political renaissance in the late twentieth century is tied to an increasing reassertion of power within the Republican coalition. Whereas analysts of business power typically highlight the organizational tools developed by business groups to assure unity within an otherwise diverse array of interests and pursue their political comeback, I will show that attention to the relationship between business and the GOP enables us to situate these tools — business's deployment of PACs, for example, or their increasing attention to elite-level lobbying — in a larger partisan political context. As we will see, and in contrast to existing scholarship, business's relationship with the conservative movement of the postwar period and the Republican establishment varied over time. Careful attention to the reasons underlying that variability make clear that business's central place within the Republican Party has never been guaranteed, but rather is the result of hard effort and creative defense.