Browsing by Subject "Judicial process--United States"
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Item Beyond partisanship? : federal courts, state commissions, and redistricting(2007) McKenzie, Mark Jonathan; Shaw, Daron R.; Perry, H. W.My dissertation examines the influence of partisanship in decision making on redistricting in state commissions and judicial rulings. My central questions are twofold. First, do Republican- and Democratic-appointed federal judges engage in decision making that favors their respective parties? Second, what is the extent of partisan voting on bipartisan state redistricting commissions? These issues possess considerable substantive importance. Some states have considered moving redistricting responsibility out of the legislature and into state commissions, while some political scientists and legal scholars have suggested more vigorous court involvement in the regulation of redistricting. Implicit in many of these arguments is the assumption that federal courts and state commissions will act as neutral arbiters. But, very little social science research exists on the behavior of these institutions. My investigation combines quantitative and qualitative evidence, using interviews I conducted of federal judges and redistricting commissioners across the country, together with statistical analyses of court decisions and commission votes. I have 138 court cases from 1981 to 2006, totaling 414 observations or judicial votes. I argue that federal judges are neither neutral arbiters nor partisan maximizers. Rather, federal judges act as constrained partisans. Judges do not necessarily favor their own party's plans in court cases anymore than they do plans created by both parties under divided government. But, when a federal judge reviews a redistricting plan drawn up by a different party, and where the judge's own party is the victim of partisan line-drawing, she will be more attuned to issues of unfairness in the process. Under circumstances where Supreme Court precedent is unclear, partisan cues become more salient for the judge, increasing the probability she will rely on partisan influences to declare the plan invalid. Interestingly enough, these partisan effects in judicial voting vanish in cases where the Supreme Court delineates unambiguous rules, such as litigation concerning 1 person 1 vote equal population claims. My analysis of state redistricting commissions, based on the votes of commissioners and in-depth interviews with them, illustrates that commissions, like courts, are also not immune to partisan decision-making. Partisan factors tend to be the overriding concern of commissioners.Item Who's minding the gates? the effects of institutional norms on judicial behavior in immigration(2003-05) Law, Anna On Ya; Levinson, Sanford, 1941-The dissertation is a study of the effect of institutional norms on the judicial behavior of Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals judges in immigration cases. Studies of judicial behavior generally focus on individual characteristics of the judges, their religion and ideology, for instance. The point of departure of this research approach is that it differentiates between the distinct institutional norms that govern specific levels of the judiciary. I conceptualize institutional norms as both abstract cognitive structures and intuitional rules and arrangements. I argue that while all levels of the judiciary are bound by the same set of cognitive structures, structural rules and operations are specific to each level of the judiciary. While cognitive structures dictate the range of possible and viable legal reasoning, rules and arrangements specific to each court influence judges to favor particular modes of legal reasoning. The primary data of the study consists of 1,727 legal opinions on immigration from the US Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals from two time periods, 1883-1893 and 1990-2000. These opinions were content analyzed to identify patterns of legal reasoning. The findings from this original data set show that while notions of national sovereignty and congressional plenary power preoccupies the Supreme Court, the Circuit Courts of Appeals are preoccupied with issues of procedural due process. The central research question in the project is, “Given that both level of the courts are working with the same set of laws, why do the two levels of the judiciary chose to emphasize different modes of legal reasoning?” This project demonstrates the processes and mechanisms by which institutional settings affect the way judges perceive their duties and roles and in turn, the kinds of legal reasoning they prefer. A key assumption is that intuitional norms better explain judicial behavior than behaviorialist or doctrinal approaches. The findings have several important theoretical implications for the study of immigration law, the courts, and institutional development. These include a call for the reevaluation of the factors that influence judicial decision-making, especially the manner in which decision-making is tied to institutional contexts.