scholarly journals Judicial Supremacy, Judicial Power, and the Finality of Constitutional Rulings

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 1067-1081
Author(s):  
Scott E. Lemieux
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Functions ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Judicial Supremacy ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Constitutional Meaning

It is widely assumed that the Supreme Court of the United States has established supremacy over contested constitutional questions, with the power to make final determinations of constitutional meaning. Since the 1960s, most scholars have assumed that legislatures and courts are engaged in a power struggle in which countermajoritarian courts can assert their will over majoritarian legislatures. More recently, a new generation of scholarship has demonstrated that judicial power often expands as a result of the willful empowerment of the judiciary by actors in other branches. Most scholars working with the latter framework, however, do not dispute that the United States has a regime of judicial supremacy—they simply see the political empowerment of courts as an explanation for why judicial supremacy has emerged despite the initially weak position of the judiciary. I argue that the insights of the political empowerment literature should be pressed further. It makes little sense to use the general label “judicial supremacy” for a system in which judicial power remains dependent on choices made by other political actors. Examining several cases that are generally seen as canonical examples of assertions of judicial supremacy, I find that courts were unable to settle constitutional debates, and in addition often either were unable to achieve their policy aims or did not actually require other political actors to do anything. The logic of new empirical findings about the sources of judicial power should compel scholars to question whether aggressive assertions of supremacy in judicial opinions are in fact accurate descriptions of how judicial power functions in the United States.

Having Their Say, Leaving Their Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Independent Organization

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.

Winning the Argument and Moving the Fight: The Legacy of a Grassroots Humanitarian

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Trade Offs

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison

The X factor: The struggle to get Latinos in US news stories amid a Latinx push and a changing journalism landscape

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Contreras
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Urban Affairs ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
The Us

Latinos make up only 5.4 percent of the overall newsroom workforce in the United States. Over the last 15 years, US media outlets have disbanded urban affairs or minority affairs beats and teams altogether. Various studies suggest Latino and African American communities continue to be under-covered by US media outlets, further marginalizing their narratives in the US experience. And for years, US media outlets have struggled on the terms used to describe people of Spanish-speaking heritage: Hispanic, Latino, Mexican American, etc. Now, because of the political empowerment LGBT residents, there is a movement to describe Latinos using the term “LatinX” — a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina. The term was an attempt to incorporate individuals who didn’t identify with a gender or who were transgender. As the US media struggles to accurately portray Latinos, the term “Latinx” faces an uphill battle for mainstream media use amid pressures for basic coverage. The author argues that “Latinx” in stories neutralized gender for the sake of inclusion and could result in ignoring the oppression around gender identity and sexuality.

The origins of French archaeology

Antiquity ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (279) ◽  
pp. 176-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Olivier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Market ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
American Science ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century

In contemporary scientific research, the most marked result of the last 30 years has been the development of a specifically American science and its emancipation from the old European intellectual heritage of the 19th century and the interwar period. This movement, marked in archaeology by the birth of the New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the anti-processual reaction of the 1980s and 1990s, has been accompanied by a process of globalization of the archaeological discipline, leading to the unification of methods and theory. The birth of a world market dominated by the United States, characterized by mass consumption and the hegemony of the economic over the political, has imposed new practices of archaeology, which post-processual scholars have been quick to exploit.

The Chicano Movement in the New America

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Mario T. García
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Descent ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Future ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The Chicano movement was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment movement by people of Mexican descent in the United States. As part of the 1960s and 1970s social movements, the movement made Chicanos and other Latinos national political actors and laid the foundation for contemporary Latino political power in the 21st century. It assured that the old America would no longer survive. Chicanos and other minorities were the future and still are the future.

Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the “Gift” of U.S. Citizenship

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Bruyneel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Citizenship Status ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The Gift

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), which unilaterally made United States citizens of all indigenous people living in the United States. This new law made citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 indigenous people in the country (the remainder were already U.S. citizens). Usually, people who have been excluded from American political life see the codi- fication of their citizenship status as an unambiguously positive political development. In the case of indigenous people and U.S. citizenship, however, one cannot find such clear and certain statements. All indigenous people certainly did not look at U.S. citizenship in the same light; in fact, very few saw it as unambiguously positive. This study demonstrates that the indigenous people who engaged the debate over U.S. citizenship came to define themselves, in various ways, as “ambivalent Americans,” neither fully inside nor fully outside the political, legal, and cultural boundaries of the United States. This effort to define a form of ambivalent American-ness reflects a significant tradition in indigenous politics, which involves indigenous political actors working back and forth across the boundaries of American political life to secure rights, resources, and/or sovereignty for the indigenous people they represent.

Crossing Thresholds: Federalism in the 1960s

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Derthick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Federalism

Compounded as it is of contrasting forms, the purely national and the purely federal, federalism in the United States is inherently unstable. The division of power and prerogative between nation and states constantly changes, tending normally to become more national. Sometimes change occurs more swiftly and penetrates more deeply than others, and the 1960s were one of those times. One after another, constitutional thresholds were crossed. By the mid-1970s, American federalism had become something very different from what it had been fifteen years before. The place of place in the American polity had been sharply devalued. Autonomous individuals as political actors had gained at the expense of place-based communities. So had groups identified by such rival attributes as race or gender.

Judicial Review: The Meaning of the Judicial Power

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy E. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
The United States ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
Judicial Supremacy ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Law

This chapter applies the concepts of interpretation and construction to the contentious issue of judicial review and examines the originalist evidence that overwhelmingly supports the judicial power to nullify unconstitutional laws. According to Article III of the Constitution: “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such Courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” The Constitution does not say explicitly that the “Supreme Court, and such inferior courts as may be established by Congress, shall have power to nullify a Law enacted by Congress and signed by the President if the Law is unconstitutional.” The absence of a clearly expressed grant of power has moved some critics of judicial review to question its legitimacy. The chapter also considers the concepts of judicial nullification and judicial supremacy as they relate to judicial review.

The Evolving Role of the United States Sentencing Commission

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Rachel E. Barkow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Sentencing Policy ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Political Value

This essay explores how the role of the United States Sentencing Commission has changed over time. It has gone through three different phases in terms of its role (either actual or perceived) in federal sentencing. The first phase covers the Commission at its inception, and the perceived role of the Commission that dominated then was that of a politically insulated, expert agency that would serve, essentially, as an independent policy maker. This vision of the Commission never materialized, but it is important to understand this model in order to appreciate why the Commission was set up the way it was. During the second and dominant phase, which lasted for roughly two decades, from 1986 until 2007, the Commission played a weak supporting role to the political actors who oversaw its work, with Congress largely controlling its output. This period was characterized by political battering by Congress. Given the political climate of the time, that meant increases in sentences, but little else, from the Commission. The third phase began in 2007 and continues today. The Commission is now seen as a respected supplier of data, and its judgments are given more deference. In a sense, this role combines the first two. The Commission is recognized for its expertise, but that expertise is valuable only insofar as the information it generates has political value. The essay concludes with ways the Commission’s design can be improved to give it greater political influence in setting sentencing policy.

scholarly journals Geopolitical Competition of World Political Actors for Influence on Contemporary Serbia

2020 ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
Andrey Vladimirovich Baranov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
European Union ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Full Control ◽  
Political Interests

The author of the paper finds out the manifestations of the geopolitical competition of world political actors (the United States, NATO, the European Un-ion) for influence on Serbia in 2008–2020. The study focuses on the political interests of these actors and strategies for their implementation. Serbia is strate-gically important for Western countries as the miss-ing link for full control over the Balkans and isola-tion of Russia. Turkey, which is pursuing a neo-Ottoman course, is interested in restoring its control over the Balkans, which is being hindered by Serbia. Ethnopolitical and confessional conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina are used by the United States, NATO, and the European Union to increase pressure on the Serbian leadership. Serbia’s geopo-litical orientations remain inconsistent, reflecting attempts to maneuver between competing world players. The possibilities for such a policy are steadily shrinking, leaving Serbia with a geopolitical choice to make.

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