State Supreme Courts and Public Policy: A Bibliography

1981 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
G.Alan Tarr
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Finance ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
State Supreme Court

During the past decade political scientists have become increasingly aware that state supreme courts make major contributions to public policy. Various highly publicized decisions concerning, for example, school finance, the termination of life support systems, and plea bargaining have underlined the importance of state supreme court policymaking. Historical studies have documented that this policy involvement is not merely a recent phenomenon. However, the Burger Court's new federalism has invited state supreme courts to play a more active role, and many courts have availed themselves of this opportunity.Yet despite the obvious importance of state supreme court activity, research on their policymaking has lagged. In part this can be attributed to the sheer volume of cases they annually decide. Numerous law journals assist the political scientist in overcoming this difficulty by publishing annual surveys of state supreme court decisions. Listed below are journals which provide such surveys.

Supreme Court Elections: How Much They Have Changed, Why They Changed, and What Difference It Makes

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 900-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Baum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Community ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Selection Systems

This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts. 1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that have attracted interest-group activity, especially from the business community. Like their extent, the effects of change in supreme court campaigns have been meaningful although exaggerated by many observers. What we have learned about changes in supreme court elections has implications for choices among selection systems, but those implications are mixed and complex.

Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts: Legitimacy Theory and “New-Style” Judicial Campaigns

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES L. GIBSON
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
State Courts ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Institutional Legitimacy ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Activity ◽  
Free Speech Rights

Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment's ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.

Courts Continue to Address the Wealth Disparity Issue

1989 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. La Morte
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Finance ◽  
Appellate Court ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
State School ◽  
Educational Adequacy ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
School Finance Litigation ◽  
School Financing ◽  
The U.S

Lawsuits in nearly three dozen states have challenged the constitutionality of state school finance provisions on equal protection or educational adequacy grounds. Presently, the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal appellate court, and 10 state supreme courts have upheld state provisions, and 7 state supreme courts have held school financing provisions unconstitutional. Although wealth-related school finance litigation began in 1968 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue in 1973, the judicial caldron continues to boil. Protracted rounds of litigation over the years in several states and a rash of recent suits reveal this issue to remain lively and contentious.

Toward A Positive Theory of State Supreme Court Decision Making

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
pp. 7-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo T. Spiller ◽  
Richard G. Vanden Bergh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The State ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Selection ◽  
State Supreme Court

State Supreme Courts have grown in importance during the last thirty years in the formation of public policy. Their judgements determine many aspects of constitutional law, tort reform, judicial selection, and campaign finance reform, among others. A vast body of literature has been developed that analyzes State Supreme Court decision making, which emphasizes the conditioning effects of the legal and institutional environment. This article expands on this previous work by incorporating the interaction of the judiciary with other government institutions, and applies the Positive Political Theory approach to law and legal institutions to the State Supreme Court. In addition, the neo-institutionalist literature of the selection process is incorporated to defend a systematic approach towards decision making. Towards that end, this article explores how judicial decisions are conditioned by institutional rules, resulting in a formal modeling of how the State Supreme Courts interact with political actors to form constitutional interpretation. This model includes the judicial selection process'retention or competitive reelection—and is extended to constitutional amendment rules, explaining how these two interact rather than acting independently. Finally, the hypothesis is tested that when State Supreme Court judges face retention elections and political preferences are homogeneous, the probability increases of observing constitutional amendment prosposals.

Malpractice & Negligence: State Supreme Courts Limit Therapists’ Duties to Third Parties

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-205
Author(s):  
Megan Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Child Sexual Abuse ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Recovered Memories ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
University Of Colorado

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 (1995): 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478 (N.H. 1998), allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256 (Iowa 1999), and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281 (1991), rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability.

scholarly journals The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heise
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Judicial Outcomes

Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly-elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to influence judicial outcomes are not the exclusive domain of business interests. That is, judicial campaign contributions from non- (and anti-) business interests increase the probability of justices’ votes favoring non-business interests. As a result, critiques of judicial elections cannot properly rely exclusively on the influence of business interests. Moreover, that both business and non-business interests can successfully influence judicial outcomes through campaign contributions point in different (and possibly conflicting) normative directions. On the one hand, even if one agrees that the judicial branch qualitatively differs from the political and executive branches in terms of assessing campaign contributions’ proper role, that the potential to influence judicial outcomes is available to any interest group (willing to invest campaign contributions) complicates popular critiques of judicial elections. On the other hand, the same empirical findings also plausibly strengthen critiques of judicial elections, especially for those who view the judicial domain differently than other political domains.

What Price Justice(s)? Understanding Campaign Spending in State Supreme Court Elections

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris W. Bonneau
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Campaign Spending ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
American Elections

Among the least-researched American elections are those for seats on the states' supreme courts, arguably some of the most important political positions in the states. We know not only that campaign spending in these races has increased sharply in the past 20 years but also that there is great variation in spending among them. What factors cause campaign spending to vary among races for the states' highest courts? And what can an understanding of campaign spending in these races tell us about campaign spending for other offices? I use data from 281 state supreme court races in 21 states from 1990 to 2000 to answer these questions. I find that state supreme court campaign spending is driven by the characteristics of the race, institutional arrangements, and the electoral and state supreme court context.

scholarly journals Same-Party Legislative Appointments and the Problem of Party-Switching

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-198
Author(s):  
Tyler Yeargain
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
State Legislator ◽  
Party Switching ◽  
Switching State

For half of the states and almost every territory in the United States, legislative vacancies are filled by some system of temporary appointments rather than by special elections. Most of these systems utilize “same-party” appointments to ensure continuity of representation. But few states have anticipated the problem of state legislators switching parties. Though party-switching is rare, it happens frequently enough that several state supreme courts have already interpreted same-party appointment statutes as applied to party-switchers. This Article argues for a uniform approach to the problem of party-switchers in same-party appointment systems. First, this Article reviews the current legislative appointment schemes as they operate today and analyzes each statute or constitutional provision to determine how each of them might treat a vacancy caused by a party-switching state legislator, as well as the four state supreme court decisions addressing this question of statutory interpretation. It then argues that the principles underlying same-party appointment systems support statutory amendments to clarify how party-switching state legislators are replaced.

scholarly journals 2017 Monsanto Lecture: The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heise
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Judicial Outcomes

52 Valparaiso University Law Review 19 (2017).Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to influence judicial outcomes are not the exclusive domain of business interests. That is, judicial campaign contributions from non- (and anti-) business interests increase the probability of justices’ votes favoring non-business interests. As a result, critiques of judicial elections cannot properly rely exclusively on the influence of business interests. Moreover, that both business and non-business interests can successfully influence judicial outcomes through campaign contributions point in different (and possibly conflicting) normative directions. On the one hand, even if one agrees that the judicial branch qualitatively differs from the political and executive branches in terms of assessing campaign contributions’ proper role, that the potential to influence judicial outcomes is available to any interest group (willing to invest campaign contributions) complicates popular critiques of judicial elections. On the other hand, the same empirical findings also plausibly strengthen critiques of judicial elections, especially for those who view the judicial domain differently than other political domains.

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