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Studies of the Supreme Court consistently show that the Office of the Solicitor General enjoys remarkable success before the Supreme Court, both at the certiorari stage and at the merits stage. These studies offer a variety of explanations for Solicitor General success, but fail to portray accurately the Office of the Solicitor General and to account for variations in governmental success. This paper seeks to continue the exploration of governmental success. By looking at the Office of the Solicitor General as a series of individuals with distinct characteristics rather than as a single entity, and by accounting for various situational dynamics, I attempt to explain the variations in executive success.

This study has two purposes: first, to test the validity of the personal attribute model in explaining judicial voting behavior outside its original cultural context; second, to explain the variation in justice's voting behavior in the Canadian Supreme Court. For the most part, the result arrived in this study supports the validity of the model in cross-cultural analysis. The result of multiple regression analysis shows that four variables, region, judicial experience prior to appointment, political party of appointing Prime Minister, and tenure account for 60 percent of the variations in justice's voting behavior. This result, hence, provides an empirical finding to the development of the personal attribute model in explaining justices' voting behavior.

This study analyzes activist behavior of Supreme Court justices in 132 decisions which struck down congressional statutes as unconstitutional in 1789-1990. Analysis of the justices' activist rates and liberalism scores demonstrate that these votes are ideologically based. Integrated models containing personal attribute and case factor variables are constructed to explore the votes as activist behavior. The same models are also tested with a new dependent variable constructed to measure the nullification votes as liberal votes. The models which explain the votes as ideological responses better explain the votes than the models which explain the votes as activism or restraint. The attribute variables offer better explanation in the late 20th century models and the case factors offer better explanation in the early period models.

This study examines the agenda setting and decision-making behavior of the United States Supreme Court from 1888 to 1989.

The ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 brought freedom of the press into the sphere of constitutional legitimacy such that it could not be nullified by the whims of elected officials. Traditionally the guarantee of a free press has been treated as an adjunct of the Speech Clause with little, if any, independent status. Recently, however, that traditional conception has come under increasing attack. Many attorneys, judges and academicians have argued for a separation of the Press and Speech Clauses. For example, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart has stated his belief that the Press Clause is a structural guarantee which provides greater First Amendment protection to the press than that generally accorded the public. Therefore, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily (1978) that ratified searches of non-suspect, third-party newsmen exemplified for these supporters the nadir of press freedom in recent years. In this study the importance of the Zurcher decision to public policy, public law and legal studies is examined in detail. The study utilizes the systems model popularized by David Easton to observe the events leading up to the decision and both the judicial and legislative responses to that decision. In addition, a new theory of press freedom is presented which analogizes the Press Clause to the Free Exercise of Religion Clause. This theory suggests that the Press Clause should be separated from the Speech Clause in the same way as the Free Exercise Clause has been separated. This would establish the Press Clause as an independent clause granting a special status to the press: a status which the author believes to be warranted by the language of the First Amendment and the absolute necessity for a press free of governmental intrusion and regulation.

This dissertation seeks to describe and explain the connection between The Supreme Court and politics outside of the judicial system. It is a case study of the reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education integration decision in the American South. I apply a theoretical model of “judicialization,” arguing that when courts affect politics outside of the judicial system, they reshape politics to resemble the adversarial legal system, sparking polarized conflict and causing non-judicial political actors to make arguments in the form of constitutional doctrine. Analyzing editorials and letters to the editor from Southern newspapers, I show that debate after Brown was characterized by appeals to constitutional principles, and that Brown increased the salience of segregation in schools as a subject of political debate. I also supplement my Southern newspaper data with data from African-American newspapers and analyze Southern elections in the periods immediately before and after the education integration decision to assess the impact of the Court’s education decision on both voters and candidates. / text

This study is concerned with the political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions concerning state legislative apportionment. First, an attempt is made to describe the political environment in which they were made, with special reference to the existing bases of representation in the states and the political reaction to the decisions. Secondly, the study traces the major issues relating to judicial enforcement of the apportionment standards enunciated by the Supreme Court and the modification and development of those standards that followed the initial decisions. Finally, the extent to which reapportionment has been successfully enforced by the courts may suggest some tentative conclusions about the viability and utility of the equal population doctrine as a constitutional standard, as well as some of the possible political consequences of enforcement of that standard.