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

Over several decades, many U.S. states abandoned the practice of selecting their judges by direct popular election and adopted the Missouri Plan of judicial selection. In From Ballot to Bench, Philip L. Dubois subjects the various criticisms raised against judicial elections to a more searching scrutiny than previously has been attempted.

Dubois carefully reviews the three central counts on which judicial elections have been faulted: for lowering the quality of the bench, for impairing judicial independence, and for failing to secure judicial accountability. After concluding that the...

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No Day in...

Theoretically, the right to privacy is an individual s right to space away from the public gaze to make life choices that are best for her or him, regardless of the beliefs of the majority. Yet the right to privacy in the United States has proven problematic for both political theorists and constitutional scholars, as it does not conform to theoretical conceptions of privacy or to existing theories of constitutional development.

Mary McThomas provides a new model that helps us to think about both the right to privacy as well as constitutional development. She first divides...

The always-controversial practice of judicial review of Congress is not prescribed in the Constitution, but is arguably a valid way to protect the rights of individuals or guard against unfair rule by the majority. This book offers a historical review and indictment of the Supreme Court's overruling of Congress, ultimately taking a position that this has been more detrimental than beneficial to the democratic process in the United States, and that in the aggregate rights of individuals and minorities would have been better served if the relevant laws of Congress had been enforced rather...

Legislatures, the judiciary and civil society are important actors in representative democracies. In what ways and how well do they represent? And how effectively do they carry out their institutional and social roles? Both questions refer to the key dimensions of democracy analyzed in this book: representativeness and effectiveness, respectively. While they have been developed separately in scholarly work on institutions and regimes, there is little work considering them simultaneously, and on their interaction. Using quantitative and/or qualitative methods, contributions from top...

Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics couch their criticisms of judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges--at the risk of intellectual stagnation--to dismiss most academic discourse as opaque and divorced from reality. In Divergent Paths, Richard Posner turns his attention to this widening gap within the legal profession, reflecting on its causes and consequences and asking what can be done to close or at least narrow it.

The shortcomings of academic legal analysis are real, but they cannot...

Despite decades of attempts and the best intentions of its members, the United States Supreme Court has failed to develop a coherent jurisprudence regarding the state s proper relationship to the individual. Without some objective standard upon which to ground jurisprudence, decisions have moved along a spectrum between freedom and authority and back again, affecting issues as diverse as individual contractual liberties and the right to privacy.

Social Contract Theory in American Jurisprudence seeks to reintroduce the lessons of modern political philosophy to offer a...

Once a highly cosmopolitan profession, law was largely domesticated by the demands of the Westphalian state. But as the walls between sovereign states are lowered, law is globalizing in a way that is likely to change law, lawyering and legal education as much over the next 30 years when the students entering law schools today reach the peak of their profession as it has over the last 300.

This book provides a sustained investigation of the theoretical and practical aspects of legal practice and education, synthesizing and developing nearly thirty years of Professor Sampford...

Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women s increasing numbers and roles in...

This text is a general introduction to American judicial process. The authors cover the major institutions, actors, and processes that comprise the U.S. legal system, viewed from a political science perspective. Grounding their presentation in empirical social science terms, the authors identify popular myths about the structure and processes of American law and courts and then contrast those myths with what really takes place. Three unique elements of this "myth versus reality" framework are incorporated into each of the topical chapters:

1) "Myth versus Reality" boxes...