abstract: I examine how gender stereotypes influence the campaign advertisements utilized by candidates for state supreme court and how these gender stereotypes influence how voters react to these advertisements. Gender stereotypes have been found to have a profound impact in races for other offices (e.g., legislative, executive), but there is a lack of research on the role of gender stereotypes in state court elections. In my present research, I first conduct a content analysis of state supreme court advertisements over the course of four election years, looking specifically at how the candidates describe themselves in their advertisements. Based on these findings, I create advertisement scripts where I vary the gender of the candidate and the type of message employed by the candidate in order to test how the gender of the candidate and the content of the messages influences voter impressions of judicial candidates. In a second experiment, I create video advertisements based on these scripts and test how the video advertisements, as well as the candidate’s gender, affect impressions of these candidates. My analyses indicate that not only gender stereotypes play a role in the way judicial candidates create their advertisements, but they also impact the way voters form opinions about candidates running in judicial races. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Political Science 2017

Legal history is social history, family history, women's history, economic history, business history, and constitutional history; in fact it is a growth industry. Records from the civil division of the British Columbia Supreme Court furnish the best possible primary sources, the evidence for local studies in these fields. This thesis is put forward as a practical guide both for scholars who wish to search records from the Vancouver Supreme Court Registry and for archivists who need a conceptual framework for appraising civil court records. It traces the origins and common law traditions of the court, describes court administration and the rules for civil procedure, tabulates the kinds of record kept by the civil division, and works out for archivists a practical means of selection. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

The interactions, often clashes, between our branches of government are some of the most salient and important features of the U.S democratic system. The Supreme Court, given its unique position within this system, finds itself at the center of many of these clashes. While considerable literature in American political science dedicates itself to the study of the interactions between the Supreme Court and other political elites, we remain without a complete understanding of how political elites interact with the Court. Specifically, we fall short in our understanding of how political elites, both liberal and conservative, react following Supreme Court decisions governing their policy interests. This study intends to bridge this gap in knowledge. By studying the reactions of political elites following 8 specifically chosen Supreme Court decisions, via an extensive content search using an expansive newspaper database, this paper identifies an asymmetry in the actions taken by liberal and conservative political elites.

Contrasted with the other branches of government, the Supreme Court has long been an institution posing a level of secretiveness equal to its power. Naturally, that has developed a desire, and maybe necessity, to gain a better understanding regarding the principal influences of judicial decision making on America’s highest Court. One phenomenon that has long been of interest to Court observers is the notion of the justice’s voting across established ideological lines. Previous attempts to explain and reconcile cross-ideological votes have focused on the influence of external actors on the Court, its legitimacy, public opinion, and dynamics between justices. Yet, there remains a need to scrutinize the types of cases most likely to produce cross-ideological votes among justices in order to offer explanatory factors as to when a particular cross-ideological vote occurs. Often ignored in the quest to ascertain factors influencing particular justices and the Court as a whole, is the need for a study of case topics and the ability of these topics to correlate to an unexpected vote by a justice. In this thesis, I analyze which legal issues embedded within Supreme Court cases are most likely to produce cross-ideological votes among justices. I then propose a theory for predicting what issue areas are most likely to produce cross-ideological votes among Supreme Court justices in the future. In this research, I find that the issue area of criminal procedure correlates to the largest number of cross-ideological votes by Supreme Court members. Interestingly, I also find that conservative and liberal justices are equally inconsistent in voting concerning criminal procedure cases.

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This study investigated whether or not the membership of the United States Supreme Court affects the way the institution rules in cases regarding federal administrative agencies by collecting and comparing votes from 2018-2019 and 2020-2022. It found in the first section that justices showed an anti-deferential attitude towards agencies and in the second section a deferential attitude towards agencies, despite the conservative majority being larger in the second section. The result is likely due to the types of agencies and content of cases involved.

The influence of ideology and attitudes on the decision-making process of Supreme Court justices has been well documented, such that the attitudinal model has emerged as the dominant paradigm for understanding judicial behavior. When ideology and personal preferences seem to eclipse legal factors, such as adherence to precedent and deference to the democratically-elected branches, outcries of 'judicial activism' have occurred. Previous studies (Lindquist and Cross 2009) have operationalized judicial activism and have provided measures for studying behavior that may be considered activist (as opposed to restrainist), further supporting the premise that ideology trumps other extra-attitudinal and legal factors in the judicial decision-making process. While the attitudinal model indicates that ideology is the strongest predictor of judicial decision-making, this research will include a number of legal variables that have significantly influenced justices' votes. As previous studies have demonstrated, an integrated model that combines a number of critical variables can have more explanatory power than one that relies on attitudinal reasons alone (Banks 1999; Hurwitz and Stefko 2004; Mishler and Sheehan 1996). As such, the purpose of this research is to examine individual level decision-making of the most ideological justices on the Burger and Rehnquist Courts (1969-2004) in regards to their activist behavior to overrule legal precedents and invalidate federal statutes. This research will employ multivariate regression analysis to assess the effects of attitudinal, legal and extra-attitudinal factors in the judicial decision-making process.

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A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion has been constitutionally protected since 1973 when, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that the state may not wholly restrict a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. In Roe, the Court invoked the 14th Amendment’s imprecise guarantee of personal liberty as grounds for the right to terminate a pregnancy without excessive interference. In later cases, specifically Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Court clarified that mere possession of the right to abortion is insufficient to guarantee personal liberty– abortion seekers must be able to exercise their right, free of “undue burdens.” According to Casey, statutes which pose an undue burden to the right to an abortion violate the Constitution. This thesis considers whether the burdens placed on abortion seekers in Florida are constitutional or a violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee to equal protection under the law. In order to measure the diversity in burdens faced by abortion-seekers, I collect data on all 67 counties across Florida, guided by the Court’s definition of relevant variables for the purpose of abortion access: the number of providers, the availability of a judicial bypass of restrictions, and the physical distance to clinics. This data is combined in a single statistic, which is called the Unde Burden Score. There is tremendous variation in the score across Florida counties, posing a challenge to the promise of equal protection under the law and for those attempting to exercise their reproductive rights. The findings suggest that Florida’s intrastate access to abortion is incredibly contingent on geographic location, suggesting that the equal right to abortion exists in theory, but not in practice.