Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> American Government - Judicial Branch

State legislatures regularly and recurrently affect constitutional meaning. However, they do so not through legal pathways like constitutional amendment or judicial challenges but by passing resolutions that assert an interpretation different than the one prevailing nationally. These resolutions help rally popular and political resistance and, when successful, alter the wider political environment and constitutional culture. Despite the obvious importance of federalism to American constitutionalism, little is known about the political influence of states in defining the American...

Michele Alexandre's innovative study examines how sexual profiling represses, oppresses, and hinders various aspects of life for both genders, and explores the ways in which the law and the community can help eradicate the practice of sexual profiling. Alexandre defines "sexploitation" as the perpetuation of myths and stereotypical notions regarding men and women in order to further an agenda of oppression and subordination in certain spheres of society. The most popular means through which this sexploitation is achieved is through a method Alexandre coins as "sexual profiling." She argues...

The Court's decisions are interpreted and disseminated via the media. During this process, the media paints an image of the Court and its business. Like any artist, the media has license regarding what to cover and the amount of attention devoted to any aspect of the Court and its business. Some cases receive tremendous attention, while others languish on the back pages or are ignored. These selection effects create a skewed picture of the Court and its work, and might affect public attitudes toward the Court. Indeed, studies of media coverage of other governmental institutions reveal that...

Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation's highest court. Health care is only the...

One of the more enduring topics of concern for empirically-oriented scholars of law and courts-and political scientists more generally-is how research can be more directly relevant to broader audiences outside of academia. A significant part of this issue goes back to a seeming disconnect between empirical and normative scholars of law and courts that has increased in recent years.

Brandon L. Bartels and Chris W. Bonneau argue that being attuned to the normative implications of one's work enhances the quality of empirical work, not to mention makes it substantially more...

The occurrence in some criminal cases of "cultural defenses" on behalf of "minority" defendants has stirred much debate. This book is the first to illuminate how "cultural evidence" - i.e., "evidence" regarding ethnicity - is actually negotiated by attorneys, expert/lay witnesses, and defendants in criminal trials. Caroline Braunmuhl demonstrates that this has occurred, overwhelmingly, in ways shaped by colonialist and patriarchal discourses common in the Western world. She argues that the controversy regarding the legitimacy of a "cultural defense" has tended to obscure this fact, and has...