scholarly journals An Attack on the Separation of Powers? Strategic Climate Litigation in the Eyes of U.S. Judges

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8335
Author(s):  
Jasmina Nedevska

Climate change litigation has emerged as a powerful tool as societies steer towards sustainable development. Although the litigation mainly takes place in domestic courts, the implications can be seen as global as specific climate rulings influence courts across national borders. However, while the phenomenon of judicialization is well-known in the social sciences, relatively few have studied issues of legitimacy that arise as climate politics move into courts. A comparatively large part of climate cases have appeared in the United States. This article presents a research plan for a study of judges’ opinions and dissents in the United States, regarding the justiciability of strategic climate cases. The purpose is to empirically study how judges navigate a perceived normative conflict—between the litigation and an overarching ideal of separation of powers—in a system marked by checks and balances.

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.


1987 ◽  
Vol 8 (x) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Richard C. Rockwell

This essay sets forth the thesis that social reporting in the United States has suffered from an excess of modesty among social scientists. This modesty might be traceable to an incomplete model of scientific advance. one that has an aversion to engagement with the real world. The prospects for social reporting in the United States would be brighter if reasonable allowances were to be made for the probable scientific yield of the social reporting enterprise itself. This yield could support and improve not only social reporting but also many unrelated aspects of the social sciences.


2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pier Francesco Asso ◽  
Luca Fiorito

Recent articles have explored from different perspectives the psychological foundations of American institutionalism from its beginning to the interwar years (Hodgson 1999; Lewin 1996; Rutherford 2000a, 2000b; Asso and Fiorito 2003). Other authors had previously dwelled upon the same topic in their writings on the originsand development of the social sciences in the United States (Curti 1980; Degler 1991; Ross 1991). All have a common starting point: the emergence during the second half of the nineteenth century of instinct-based theories of human agency. Although various thinkers had already acknowledged the role of impulses and proclivities, it was not until Darwin's introduction of biological explanations into behavioral analysis that instincts entered the rhetoric of the social sciences in a systematic way (Hodgson 1999; Degler 1991). William James, William McDougall, and C. Lloyd Morgan gave instinct theory its greatest refinement, soon stimulating its adoption by those economists who were looking for a viable alternative to hedonism. At the beginning of the century, early institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen, Robert F. Hoxie, Wesley C. Mitchell, and Carleton Parker employed instinct theory in their analysis of economic behavior. Their attention wasdrawn by the multiple layers of interaction between instinctive motivation and intentional economic behavior. Debates on the role of instinctsin economicswere not confined to the different souls of American Institutionalism, and many more “orthodox” figures, like Irving Fisher or Frank Taussig, actively participated.


1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Coats

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.


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