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.

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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

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The focus of this investigation is the relationship of the United States Supreme Court's functional performance to its environment. Three functions of courts are noted in the literature: conflict resolution, social control and administration. These functions are operationalized for the United States Supreme Court. Hypotheses are developed relative to the general performance of these three functions by all courts. Box-Jenkins time series analysis is then used to test these hypotheses in relation to the performance of the United States Supreme Court. The primary analysis rests upon a data set that includes all non-unanimous decisions of the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1986. A supplemental analysis is conducted using all formal decisions for the 1953 to 1986 period. The results suggest that intellectual resources, legal resources, modernization, and court discretion are significant influences on the functional performance of the United States Supreme Court. Future research must consider these influences in the development of a general theory of courts.