scholarly journals ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND CONGRESSIONAL MALFEASANCE: COMPARING BRAZILIAN SENATORS AND DEPUTIES IN THE SUPREME COURT CASES

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Taeko Hiroi
Legal Theory ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99
Author(s):  
Andrew Altman

Recently, legal and social thinkers have turned to the idea that actions possess a nonlinguistic meaning, called “expressive meaning.” In this article I examine the idea of expressive meaning and its role in legal reasoning. My focus is on a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving constitutional challenges to election districts drawn on the basis of race. The Supreme Court used the idea of expressive meaning in striking down the districts. After explicating the idea of expressive meaning, I explain and criticize the Court’s reasoning. I distinguish the approach of Justices Thomas and Scalia, who hold that all uses of race in districting do constitutional harm, from that of Justice O’Connor, who distinguishes uses of race that do constitutional harm from those that do not. I contend that Justice O’Connor is right to make the distinction but she draws the line using a questionable standard. A more defensible standard would be more accommodating to the districts that the Court invalidated.


Author(s):  
Lucas A. Powe

This book examines the impact of Supreme Court cases from Texas on the entire nation. It argues that the most important Supreme Court cases have originated in Texas, which help explain why it is Texas and not California that provides breadth and depth to constitutional adjudication. Texas litigants, lawyers, politicians, and judges all play important roles in the underlying interplay of law and politics at the local, state, and national levels. In all its facets, Texas offers a window to all constitutional law and the Supreme Court. The book shows that Texas's impact literally started at the beginning by precipitating a debate over national powers and then a war with Mexico, and that the fraught relationship between Texas, the nation, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court in the century and a half since Texas v. White has produced more constitutional law than any other state.


Author(s):  
Camille Walsh

Chapter Two examines a handful of pivotal Supreme Court cases brought against school desegregation at the turn of the century and the first few decades of the 20th century. The Cumming v. Georgia case in 1899 indicated a demand for equality on the basis of taxpayer status that was understood by the plaintiffs to be intertwined with race, a demand that was interpreted by the Supreme Court only in the language of taxation and federalism. This chapter also highlights regional variations and a number of cases brought at the height of Jim Crow segregation by people of color who fell outside the black-white paradigm, even if courts then imposed it on them.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayelet Blecher-Prigat

This article questions the value of the basic right to marry that was recognised by the Israeli Supreme Court in the early 2000s as part of the basic right to human dignity. Since its early days, Israeli law has developed a tradition that has diminished the significance of formal marriage as a way to bypass the religious-based restrictions on marriage in Israel, with the emphasis instead on the idea of functional joint intimate lives.Against this legal background, the article explores the basic right to marry. It discusses and analyses the Supreme Court cases that have recognised a basic right to marry. It then considers several options to help in understanding the meaning of this right, and supports an understanding of the right to marry within a framework of equality, according to which human dignity requires equality in affording official recognition to intimate partnerships. Nonetheless, given the potentially limited effect of a basic right to marry in Israel, the article considers the idea of abolishing legal marriage in Israel altogether. Responding to potential critique by reference to the unique Israeli context, it suggests that such abolition could resolve the continuous conflict between Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state and its self-definition as a democratic state in the context of recognising adult intimate relationships. As presented in this article, constitutional limitations do not stand in the way for the State of Israel to abolish legal marriage.


2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Amsterdam

This article reconstructs the story behindFreeman v. Pitts(1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history inFreeman.


1995 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACK E. CALL

In 1991, the Supreme Court held in Wilson v. Seiter that in a prison conditions case, the plaintiff must prove that prison officials acted with deliberate indifference to the plaintiff's constitutional rights. Although this decision might appear to make it more difficult for inmates to win overcrowding lawsuits, it is predicted that this will not be the case. Published lower-court overcrowding cases are examined to determine what the effect of Wilson ( and two other Supreme Court cases decided since Wilson) has been. It is concluded that, although the number of published lower-court overcrowding cases since Wilson is not large, early indications are that these recent Supreme Court cases are not likely to have a dramatic impact upon the legal environment for prison overcrowding cases.


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