In view of the ability of the Court to retain and increase its power in the face of criticism, a study of past historical precedents should furnish some guide to an assessment of the position of this branch of the government today.

No description available.

No description available.

This study intends to examine criticisms of the Court and efforts to curb its power during the formative period of American constitutional law.

Since its creation in 1875, the Canadian Supreme Court has undergone several institutional transitions. These transitions have changed the role of the Court toward a more explicit and influential policy making role in the country. Despite this increasingly significant role, very limited attention has been given to the Court. With this perspective in mind, this study presents several analyses on the decision making process of the Canadian Supreme Court. At the institutional level, the study found that within the stable workload, the cases composition has shifted away from private law to public law cases. This shift is more significant when one concentrates on appeals involving constitutional and rights cases. The study found that this changing pattern of the Court's decision making was a result of the institutional changes shaping the Supreme Court. Statistically, the abolition of rights to appeal in civil cases in 1975 was found to be the most important source of the workload change.

If Supreme Court behavior is structured largely by the policy preferences of the justices, political scientists ought to consider the source of those preferences. Religion is one force that can strongly shape a judge’s worldview and therefore her votes. In this paper, I examine the effect of religion on U.S. Supreme Court votes in 11 issue areas plausibly connected to religious values. Catholic justices vote in ways that more closely adhere to the teachings of the Catholic Church than non-Catholic justices even after controlling for ideology. These results may indicate that Catholic theology is different from Protestant or Jewish theology. It is also possible that on some issues there is not much of a theological difference, but religious values play a more prominent role in public life for Catholic justices. / text

With increasing frequency, the United States Supreme Court has faced questions pertaining to the Constitutional rights of parents. Contemporary conflicts between states’ authority and parents’ rights to shape the moral education of children are manifestations of a tension in liberal political thought. Although liberalism assigns responsibility for the education of children to private institutions, such as families and churches, there is a public need in liberal regimes for citizens to possess certain skills, habits, and beliefs. When these competing interests have come before the Supreme Court, its rhetoric has not always done justice to the importance of both interests. Here, I examine the Court’s nineteenth-century jurisprudence on polygamy, its important early twentieth-century cases on the family, and a selection of recent cases relating to the education of children. I conclude that the Supreme Court has in recent years put too little emphasis on the legitimate interests of states in shaping the moral education of children. / text

Même si la question du souverain bien et de ce qui le constitue était au fondement des systèmes moraux des Anciens, elle semble n'être plus à l'ordre du jour pour nous, les Modernes. Pourtant, nous dit Kant, l'homme ne peut rien vouloir si ce n'est sous l'idée d'une fin et il a besoin, pour pouvoir mettre un terme à la série de ses fins, de concevoir un inconditionné, une fin « architectonique» sienne, dont le nom est le « souverain bien ». En abordant à nouveau la question du sens universel de la vie humaine, Kant adhère à une conception antique de la philosophie pratique dans laquelle celle-ci, en tant que téléologie morale, enseigne à l'homme en quoi doit consister la fin absolument nécessaire de sa conduite et comment il peut l'atteindre. Il élabore donc, comme les Anciens, une théorie du "summum bonum" dont le point d'orgue est la réponse aux deux questions pratiques de la philosophie. Que puis-je espérer (question de l'essence du souverain bien) ? Que dois-je faire (question de la conduite menant au souverain bien) ? Mais la Révolution copernicienne consiste, en éthique, à découvrir que le concept du bien et celui du bien le plus grand sont déterminés par la loi morale. La morale kantienne formule d'abord la loi morale, pour ensuite définir le bien et le souverain bien, tandis que les Anciens faisaient l'inverse. Ces points de méthode sont responsables d'une théorie qui s'oppose aux morales antiques par plusieurs aspects. Elle conduit à l'idée d'une hétérogénéité de fins humaines qui implique une conception du souverain bien comme une synthèse contenant un rapport de subordination, le bonheur conditionné par la moralité. / Even though the question of the highest good and what it consists in lay at the basis of the Ancients ' moral systems, it seems to have gone out of fashion in the Modern era. However, according to Kant, man cannot will anything but under the idea of good and, in order to be able to bring the series of his ends to a close, he needs to conceive the idea of an unconditioned end of his, the "highest good". By tackling the problem of the universal meaning of human life, Kant pays tribute to an ancient approach to practical philosophy in which the latter, in its teleological aspect, teaches man what the absolutely necessary end of his conduct must consist in and how he can attain it. As a result, he builds a doctrine of the summum bonum, following in the Ancients' footsteps, the conclusion of which doctrine lies in the answer to philosophy's two pratical questions. What may I hope (the question concerning the essence of the highest good)? What am I to do (the question concerning the conduct resulting in the highest good)? But the Copernican Revolution in ethics is the discovery that the concept of the good and that of the highest good are determined by the moral law. Kantian ethics formulates the moral law first, and defines the good and the highest good later, in the converse order from that in which the Ancients operated. This original method is responsible for a theory that opposes ancient ethics in many ways. It leads Kant to the idea that human ends are heterogeneous and that the highest good is a synthesis based on a relation of subordination, i.e., happiness conditioned by morality.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Andrew Orr / The history of Italy during World War I has often been characterized by the eleven bloody and inconsequential battles on the Isonzo River from 1915 to 1917. The twelfth battle, Caporetto, was one of the most lopsided defeats of the war. The subsequent development of an inter-Allied Supreme War Council has often been portrayed as a British and French creation with little Italian input. However, the defeat at Caporetto actually signified the rapid escalation of Italy’s influence among her Allies. Combined with American tentativeness and Russian collapse, the winter of 1917-1918 offered key Italian leaders the opportunity to manipulate debates on Allied strategy. Ultimately, the Italians could not keep true to the promises they made during a succession of inter-Allied conferences. This failure led to indecision by Italian leaders during the critical campaigns of 1918 and disillusionment in Italy itself during the post-war era.

No description available.