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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 1913. / Vita. Published also as Johns Hopkins university studies in historical and political science, ser. XXXVII, no. 4. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1915. / Issued also without thesis note. Reproduction of original from Harvard Law School Library. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis explores various approaches to constitutional interpretation, paying particular attention to the literalist approach to reading the Constitution set forth by W.W. Crosskey in Politics and the Constitution. Crosskey’s approach is compared to and contrasted with John Rohr’s intentionalist approach to reading the Constitution and the approach of judicial activism. Drawing from literary theory, this thesis outlines Stanley Fish and Robert Scholes’ approaches to reading. Fish, like judicial activists, subordinates the text to the reader. Scholes, like Crosskey, argument for textual primacy. These literary critics mirror the debate in constitutional scholarship over where meaning lies: with the text or with the reader. The debate over interpreting the Constitution adds to the tradition in public administration of normatively grounding the discipline in the Constitution. If this attempt at finding a normative grounding for public administration is to be successful, it must consider issues of interpretation. / Master of Public Administration

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Puerto Rico has been a United States territory since 1898. Since then, the island has remained in an ill-defined relationship with the United States, lacking autonomy and sovereignty. The Supreme Court and Congress have been the primary agents dealing with Puerto Rico's territorial trajectory. While the island has faced many setbacks throughout the years, this thesis asserts that the zenith in autonomy and sovereignty was reached in the 1950s, after two key legislative developments. This set forth an experiment in territorial administration. But the experiment was abandoned and closed in 2016, after two Supreme Court decisions and an Act of Congress sent Puerto Rico—the experiment—in retrograde motion. This thesis explores Puerto Rico's politico-legal developments, with a focus on the 1950s and 2016.

In this study, I examined the Supreme Court's agenda from 1801 to 1993 to determine the composition and dynamics of the issues that have dominated the business of the Court. Specifically, I set out to test empirically Robert G. McCloskey's (now standard) characterization of the Supreme Court's history, which sees it as dominated by nationalism/federalism issues before the Civil War, by economic issues just after the War through the 1930s, and by civil rights and liberties since the 1930s. The question that drove my investigation was "Is McCloskey's interpretation, which appears to be based on the great cases of Supreme Court history, an accurate description of the agenda represented in the Supreme Court's total body of reported decisions?" To test McCloskey's historical theses I employed concepts adapted from Richard Pacelle's (1991) important work on the agenda of post-Roosevelt Court and used the methods of classical historical analysis and of interrupted time-series analysis. Data for my research came from existing datasets and from my own collection (I coded the manifest content of thousands of Supreme Court's decisions from 1887 back to 1801). The most important finding from my analyses is that McCloskey not withstanding, the pre-Civil War Supreme Court's agenda was clearly dominated by economic issues of various sorts, not by nationalism/federalism as previously believed. Another key finding is that partisanship had a pronounced impact on the Court's attention to this category of issueseven in the periods when the Supreme Court had very little control of its docket. These results suggest that Supreme Court scholars should reassess or rethink their previous notion of the Court's pre-Civil War agendathe now well-established view that nation-state issues dominated the business of the Court in its formative yearsand the idea (often expressed implicitly) that the Court's mandatory jurisdiction suppressed attitudinal factors on the Court in the earlier eras.

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