Suchergebnisse

Waltenburg and Swinford provide a detailed and systematic examination of state government activity before the U.S. Supreme Court. They provide an explanatory model of state litigation behavior that both rests upon a solid theoretical perspective and places state decisions in a larger political context.||After an examination of the evolution of U.S. constitutional law on issues of direct state concern, Waltenburg and Swinford focus most of their attention on qualitative and quanitative analyses of the behavior over time of states in all their roles before the Court. Scholars and other researche

AbstractPrevious research suggests that the mainstream media's portrayals of the U.S. Supreme Court as an objective and impartial institution contribute to its diffuse support among the public. This study explores what happens if people are not exposed to these messages, relying instead on information sources that portray the Court and its justices as being politically oriented and motivated. We use the 2003 Blacks and the U.S. Supreme Court Survey data and coarsened exact matching to examine the effect of exposure to the Black media, whose reports are less likely to include legitimizing symbols of the Court. We find that exposure to the Black media significantly lowers people's diffuse support for the Court among both Blacks and Whites. This result indicates that differences between Blacks and Whites with respect to their diffuse support for the Court are likely to be a function of the informational environment to which they are exposed rather than race per se.

Unlike other policy-making institutions that actively attempt to shape public opinion, the Supreme Court is largely dependent upon others to disseminate its policy pronouncements to the public. One consequence: How the media frame the Court's actions can affect public support for Court policies. This article presents the results of an experiment designed to take soundings on the effect of different media frames on White and Black support for a controversial affirmative action ruling. Using stimuli we created based on coverage of the Adarand v. Pena (1995) decision in the Black press and the mainstream press, we find that media framing has a significant effect on agreement with the Court's policy among White subjects. For Blacks, the impact of the media framing is moderated by ideological predispositions. In addition, both White and Black support for the Court's ruling is influenced by the media portrayal of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Examines the capability of the states as Supreme Court litigators, effect of their perceptions of the Republican Court on increasing the number of cases brought, and effect of their estimates of success on their decisions to engage the Court; based on survey data; US.

Examines US v. Lopez, Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, and Printz v. US, and the bloc's coherence and consistency across other cases of interest to state governments during the 1994-96 terms.