Historians of the founding years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) acknowledge General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s role as the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), yet they ignore the effect Eisenhower’s rhetoric had in the creation of a sense of unity among Western European nations. Rhetorical analysis of Eisenhower’s time as SACEUR offers scholars a unique look into the founding years of NATO and the beginning of European unification. Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of the four master tropes, I analyze how Eisenhower’s role in the development of NATO was important to the eventual development of a unified Europe.

This paper is a study on the effect of caste on bench assignments on the Indian Supreme Court. The objective was to determine whether the Chief Justices have historically assigned associate justices to benches based on their individual castes – Brahmin or Non-Brahmin – in order to tilt the bias of the Court in either an elitist (Brahmin) direction or a non-elitist (Non-Brahmin) direction. Based on a probability analysis of panel assignments, I created a new model to determine the extant of castebased judicial selection bias on the Indian Supreme Court. Using a random sample of cases from 1950 to 2000, a two-sample test of proportionality was employed to test whether any bias was present in the Chief Justice’s bench assignments. No caste bias was discovered in either the fifty-year period of the Court or in a smaller data set of cases between 1977 and 2000 (a period after the emergency between 1975 and 1977).

Recusal, or judicial disqualification, occurs when a judge abstains from a particular legal proceeding because of a personal conflict of interest. All levels of the judicial system and some administrative agencies in the United States apply the concept of recusal, but this study focuses on the United States Supreme Court. Title 28 of the United States Code provides standards (not obligatory by legal means) on when Supreme Court Justices should recuse themselves. But Supreme Court Justices are themselves the arbiters of their own recusal and often these substantive standards are not met. The method of study applied is theoretical, using both quantitative and qualitative data from past Supreme Court cases.

This paper comparatively compares compliance to the rulings of the United States Supreme Court and the ECJ by the state/member state courts. Besides comparing the compliance to the two courts judgements, the paper also tries to establish how to increase compliance with these rulings in the future. This is done because compliance is an important aspect of a functioning judicial system, and a comparison might reveal solutions from one side that could be utilized on the other. The main resources used in this book are: articles, books, webpages and statistics on the subject. The main focus lies on the legal approach, but as a comparative study, elements of political science have been used as well. The results of the comparison show that although statistical compliance is quite high, the actual compliance might be lower due to lack of knowledge or political divisions. Increasing the actual compliance is then a good strategy to be sure that lower courts follow the rulings correctly. The conclusion of this paper is that political and policy divisions in a country, or between an organization and its members results in non- compliance. Reducing this kind of friction will help increase compliance to decisions, not only statistically but also in practice, as the lower courts will feel more comfortable with the rulings. An increase of knowledge of the subject, and the development of efficient judicial mechanisms in a state will also help assure correct interpretation of the rulings.

Culture plays a part in the construction of legal understandings in the Supreme Court contrary to much legal scholarship. The oral argument of the Supreme Court is a unique way for Justices to gather information beyond the formalized briefs and prior written opinions. In the oral argument the Supreme Court Justices utilize cultural codes as tools to probe, shape, negotiate and challenge the legal meanings and boundaries of the case before them. Using the oral argument transcript in a 2010 Supreme Court case on the issue of whether California has the right to censor the sale of violent video games to minors, this study attempts to understand the sociological processes behind constructing law. Findings show cultural codes being used by the Justices, in this legal context of an oral argument, to address the border disputes and help to establish the specific legal parameters of a case.

Despite its emergence as a key player in igniting policy change, very little work has been done to understand the Supreme Court’s agenda in terms of policy content. Scholars have tended to describe the Court mostly in terms of the direction (liberal/conservative) of justices’ decisions and the significance of particular cases. As a result, I ask if the Supreme Court allocates a disproportionate share of its docket to particular policy areas and if over attention to issue areas can be explained in terms of ideological shifts on the Court. This paper utilizes a new dataset, which includes a sample of 4591 certiorari denied cases and all 7014 cases granted certiorari from 1948 to 1990. Each case is coded for policy content according to the Policy Agendas Project coding scheme. By comparing the policy content of certiorari granted and certiorari denied cases over time, I show that judicial attention to policy areas waxes and wanes and court eras can be differentiated according to which issues occupied a disproportionate share of the Court’s attention. Additionally, I demonstrate that disproportionate attention to a subset of issue areas varies with changes in the ideological makeup of the Court. / text

This study analyzes the role the Supreme Court of India has tried to carve for itself in the Indian political system. An introductory section describes institutional characteristics of the Court and assesses its troubled attempts to define a proper doctrine of judicial review. Subsequent sections discuss Court rulings concerned with the "right to property" and affirmative discrimination for Untouchables. It is shown that the Court garnered strong support among educated and propertied segments of the population for its defense of an independent adjudication of issues arising out of agrarian reform legislation. It is also shown that the Court was capable of imposing flexible and effective standards over affirmative discrimination, despite the incapacity of elected leaders to resolve inherent moral and political problems arising out of the identification of beneficiaries. These outcomes bring into question the tendency of existing research to ignore as inconsequential the role played by judicial institutions in rapidly developing societies. Examination of cases concerned with property rights reveals that the Court was faced with genuine affronts to its integrity as an institution. These affronts came in the form of constitutional amendments which would have enabled elected elites to bypass altogether judicial imposition of constitutional limitations. The Court's reaction to this threat radically departed from the passive role usually assigned by analysts to the courts in the Third World. Giving itself the unique power to reject amendments to the Constitution, the Court projected a militant ideological defense of its proper function. This study carefully analyzes the political setting which made such a defense possible. It is suggested that the Court achieved a temporary triumph precisely because of the growing incapacity of alternate institutions to process difficult social demands. This explanation for judicial assertiveness is reinforced in the decisions concerned with affirmative discrimination. The rise of Supreme Court dominance over standards governing policies in this area is traced to conceptual and practical difficulties which courts seem uniquely equipped to handle. It is shown that non-judicial institutions were utterly unprepared to resolve inherent conflicts between group and individual rights implicit within caste-based affirmative discrimination. The Court could "resolve" such conflicts by deliberate obfuscation of legal categories identifying beneficiaries. Not faced with the practical implementation of programs under its scrutiny, the Court was required only to devise a legal language which would satisfy the need to legitimize such programs while keeping them limited to the genuinely needy. Detailed examination of these policy conflicts shows that it is possible for judicial institutions to articulate and act upon their own prerogatives in a country undergoing instability and institutional decay. Comparable research for other countries is suggested in the conclusion.

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This study explores the political impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Supreme Court of Canada. This influence is contrasted with the judiciary's historic reluctance to recognize civil liberties, commencing with the position taken by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the cautious reaction of the Supreme Court to the Diefenbaker Bill of Rights. / The treatment of civil liberties under the Charter is considered through a survey of some of the Charter cases addressed by the Supreme Court of Canada. The political consequences of the Court's decisions are examined. Alternative possibilities for the Court's role in Canadian society are considered, including the prospects for entrenchment under the Meech Lake Accord and other recently proposed reforms. / The criticism that too much power is being vested in the "least democratic branch" is addressed and the suggestion that the Charter should be located in the "communitarian tradition of Canadian politics" is appraised. This study reflects upon the theoretical assumptions which underlie the existence of the Charter, as it evaluates the political theory behind differing conceptions of judicial interpretation. This thesis concludes by determining that the Supreme Court has made a positive political contribution to Canadian society.

For centuries, the theory and principles of diplomatics have played a role in the work of European archivists. In North America, however, its relevance is still under scrutiny. This thesis employs diplomatic analysis to test its validity when applied to modern documents and procedures. To investigate the significance of diplomatic methodology and analysis, this thesis first discusses the recent history and structure of the British Columbia court system. It then examines a selection of case files from the civil, probate and bankruptcy registries, and it assigns the documents within to one of the six phases of a procedure: initiative, inquiry, consultation, deliberation, deliberation control, and execution. The study concludes by discussing the diplomatic character of the procedures and its importance in the understanding of modern records. More specifically, it outlines how diplomatics and procedural analysis can assist records professionals in the development of classification systems and retention and disposition schedules; the design of automated records management systems; and archival appraisal, arrangement and description.