The New Judicial Selection Landscape

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-76
Author(s):  
Charles Gardner Geyh
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Judicial Selection ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
New Politics ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
Additional Table ◽  
Enemy Combatants

Chapter 3 maps the current judicial selection landscape by describing a series of developments decades in the making that has altered the political environment of judicial elections in fundamental ways. The chapter begins with a table showing the breakdown across all fifty U.S. states regarding which of the five methods of selecting judges are used by each state in selecting its high court judges. An additional table demonstrates how each state treats the reselection of a judge after the judge’s initial appointment or election. The chapter then turns to the contributing causes of the new politics of judicial elections, which include the weakening of the Democratic Party in the southern states, the rise of discretionary Supreme Court Review and the decline of mundane cases, the migration of civil rights and civil liberties campaigns to state courts, the role judges play as enemy combatants in the War on Crime, and the battle for tort reform going on in the state courts, which have resulted in the changing landscape of the American judiciary. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the consequences of these changes.

Building a Left Coast: The Legacy of the California Popular Front and the Challenge to Cold War Liberalism in the Post-World War II Era

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

scholarly journals Enemy Aliens

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-142
Author(s):  
Imad A. Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Palmer Raids ◽  
The Government ◽  
Enemy Combatants

David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is a brilliantconstitutional attorney and an outstanding advocate of civil liberty. InEnemy Aliens, he articulates the case that Attorney General John Ashcroft’sabridgements of the civil liberties of non-citizens and alleged “enemy combatants”in the name of the war on terrorism is at once part of an old strategyof establishing such constitutionally questionable actions against thosepeople least politically able to defend themselves and, at the same time, thefirst step to expanding such incursions against civil rights into the populationat large.Cole writes with the meticulous care appropriate to a legal mind ofthe first caliber and with a graceful and literate rhetorical style. “The linebetween citizen and foreigner, so natural during wartime,” he writes (p.5), “is not only easy to exploit when restrictive measures are introduced,but also easy to breach when the government later finds it convenient todo so.” Cole writes with authority on facts of which too many Americansare completely ignorant: selective detention and deportation based onreligion or national origin, secret trials (or no trials), prolonged interrogation“under highly coercive, incommunicado conditions ... and withoutaccess to lawyers,” and “indefinite detention on the attorney general’ssay-so” (p. 5).Cole presents the historical precedents that justify his thesis. In 1988,President Ronald Reagan signed a bill apologizing for the appalling detentionof Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, that internmentwas an extension of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, “driven by nativist fearsof radical French and Irish immigrants” (p.7), but still on the books. The“Palmer Raids” of the early twentieth century, wherein thousands of for ...

The Cities on the Hill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Ogorzalek
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The New Deal

Recent electoral cycles have drawn attention to an urban–rural divide at the heart of American politics. This book traces the origins of red and blue America. The urbanicity divide began with the creation of an urban political order that united leaders from major cities and changed the Democratic Party during the New Deal era. These cities, despite being the site of serious, complex conflicts at home, are remarkably cohesive in national politics because members of city delegations represent their city as well as their district. Even though their constituents often don’t see eye-to-eye on important issues, members of these city delegations represent a united city position known as progressive liberalism. Using a wide range of congressional evidence and a unique dataset measuring the urbanicity of U.S. House districts over time, this book argues that city cohesion, an invaluable tool used by cities to address their urgent governance needs through higher levels of government, is fostered by local institutions developed to provide local political order. Crucially, these integrative institutions also helped foster the development of civil rights liberalism by linking constituencies that were not natural allies in support of group pluralism and racial equality. This in turn led to the departure from the coalition of the Southern Democrats, and to our contemporary political environment. The urban combination of diversity and liberalism—supported by institutions that make allies out of rivals—teaches us lessons for governing in a world increasingly characterized by deep social difference and political fragmentation.

From Property Rights to Liberty Rights: We the Corporations, A Review Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
Laura Phillips Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Action ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right ◽  
We The People

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

“A Woman's World”: The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dorn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Home Front ◽  
University Of California ◽  
World War ◽  
Young Women's Christian Association ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
The University

The fairer sex takes over and the campus becomes a woman's world. They step in and fill the shoes of the departing men and they reveal a wealth of undiscovered ability. The fate of the A.S.U.C. [Associated Students of the University of California] and its activities rests in their hands and they assume the responsibility of their new tasks with sincerity and confidence. —Blue and Gold, University of California, Berkeley, 1943During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

scholarly journals Civil Rights, Culture Wars, Voting and the Downfall of the Democratic Party in the South

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
James L. Baumgardner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The South ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
White Voters

Throughout much of its existence, the Democratic Party was heavily dependent upon the votes of the white South for its electoral success. In the last forty years, that situation has changed drastically. The erstwhile Democratic Solid South has been transformed into a Republican bastion. While many commentators still seek to explain this phenomenon in terms of race, white Southerners publicly are able to maintain political correctness by setting their change of political heart in a quite different context. This paper seeks to place the current political situation in the South in a historical context that explains how the racial issues that actually launched the downfall of the Democratic Party in that region became eclipsed by a national cultural conflict that has allowed an ever increasing number of white voters in the South to explain themselves in the transcending language of morality that comes so easily to Republicans rather than in the debasing context of race.

scholarly journals Book Review: Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2nd ed.

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Seth Kershner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right

Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. The #MeToo movement. Over the past decade, the United States has seen a surge in activism around civil rights, broadly defined as the right to be free from discrimination and unequal treatment in arenas such as housing, the workplace, and the criminal justice system. At times, as when activists are arrested at a protest, calls for civil rights can also be the occasion for violations of civil liberties—certain basic freedoms (e.g., freedom of speech) that are either enshrined in the Constitution or established through legal rulings. While civil rights are distinct from civil liberties, students often struggle to articulate these differences and appreciate the links between the two concepts. Complicating this distinction is the fact that historically reference materials have tended to cover either one or the other but not the two in combination. Combining these two concepts in one work is what makes a revised edition of the Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties so timely and valuable.

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