Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How did courts gain the power
and authority they currently wield in America? This paper is part of a
larger project arguing that the origins of contemporary judicial
supremacy lie in the nineteenth century state courts and their
relationship to partisan politics. Earlier work on the antebellum era
found that the development of permanent party competition during the
1830s caused a surge of judicial activism in state supreme courts.
Parties empowered their judiciaries as a hedge against electoral defeat
and refrained from the attacks on courts that had been common in
earlier decades. Moreover, the states with the most intense party
competition had the largest leap forwards in judicial power. This paper
carries the analysis forward into the post-Civil War era. It examines
the use of judicial review by eight state supreme courts between 1860
and 1890. (The states are New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio,
Virginia, Alabama, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.) Preliminary
results indicate that party competition still fueled judicial power.
The most competitive states had the most active judiciaries. But there
is also evidence that courts were beginning to achieve more automony
from their political environments. Even in states where party
competition decayed after the Civil War, courts retained a substantial
measure of their ability to act against legislatures. In some states,
courts actually became a focus of opposition to dominant political
coalitions. Groups, especially reforming elites, gave up on the party
system and began turning to theoretically nonpartisan institutions like
the courts as a means of change. This period was also one of transition
to a more dominant role for federal constitutional law in the exercise
of judicial review. Particularly in the 1880s,
state courts began to rely more on the US Supreme Court's various
interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment for questions where they
earlier would have relied enitrely on their own state constitutions.
However, these US Supreme Court decisions often drew heavily on
doctrines developed earlier by state courts, underlining
the crucial part these institutions played in laying the groundwork for
the coming expansion of federal judicial power.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper seeks to expand current measures of judicial ideology for the US Courts of Appeals. Similar to the Giles, Hettinger and Peppers (GHP) scores for ideology of lower court judges, I create a measure of judicial ideology based on the ideology of the pivot players involved in the nomination process. Using those pivot players that are a significant predictors of vote outcomes (the President, the chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, and the 41st flibuster pivot), I create a unifed measure of judicial ideology. This score better predicts vote outcomes and suggests that measures of judicial ideology should be expanded to include advances in the study of pivot players that shape the nomination process.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper describes the juridical and judicial reforms in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in the two first decades of the independent period (1810-1830). After the collapse of Spanish rule and in the middle of a growing circulation of Enlightned discourses, Latin American elites faced the challenge of founding over new (secular, consensual) basis the political order. In that context, the rethoric of the �rule of law� and �government of law� became -if certainly an unachieved imperative- a shared argumentative place of creole elites.
Scholarship on legal history use to analyse in �transitional� term this period supposing the goals these actors �should have pursued� were evident and, doing so, it has neglect the specifity of the period itself. Focusing in the city of Buenos Aires, as a case study, this paper analyse the contemporary dilemmas around law and justice (the constitution of juries, the organisation of professional spheres, the use of judicial system to persecute political enemies, the division of powers) that politicians, publicists and a nascent �public opinion� discussed and the alternatives they considered, without judging them as incomplete or imperfect aplications of foreing ideas. Restore the contingent dimension of the administration of justice reforms in the revolutionary period and describe his gravitation in the actual feature of the judicial system are the main purposes of this essay.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Previous scholarly work (Dubois 1979, 1980; Hall 2001) has called into question the purported advantages of nonpartisan judicial elections. In this paper, a potential benefit of nonpartisan elections distinct from these previous works -- that they may result in a greater number of alternatives from which to choose than partisan elections -- is examined. Using state supreme court election data, however, we do not find support for this hypothesis. Therefore, the precise benefits of using nonpartisan elections (as opposed to partisan elections) to elect state supreme court judges are still unknown. Other consequences of nonpartisan elections -- such as whether they result in more or less qualified candidates than partisan elections -- are also discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For much of the 20th Century the Court allocated substantially more of its agenda to cases involving individual rights claims than to cases involving power distribution among governmental entities. The Court began deciding more significant separation of powers cases in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and in the latter decade and into the 1990’s also began to become significantly more interested in policing the federal system.In the first decade of the 21st century that trend has continued, with the Court now a key player in the legal controversies about presidential power during war time._x000d_How do we explain this development and what are its implications for inter-branch relations in the U.S. context? I explore these questions, arguing that the increased agenda space allocated to separation of powers cases is in part driven by political developments outside the court and in part by the judicial philosophy of justices on the Court. An examination of the conflicts addressed by the court and the way in which they have been resolved suggests a hierarchy of institutional “winners” and “losers” where the courts and the needs of the judicial process trump both Congressional and Executive assertions of power.