Hyperbole is the common response in the wake of any Supreme Court decision, but which cases have a lasting negative impression and why? This work seeks to clarify which rulings of the Court cause consternation among several different audiences. Through an experimental framework I conduct an examination of reactions to rulings in controversial cases among political scientists, legal scholars, and the public. I discover that there are some commonalities among the respondents, but also significant disagreement along issue areas, particularly cases decided based on economic property rights. Additionally I observe that partisan ideology has little impact on the perception of historic decisions, but in contemporary rulings the opposite is discovered. This finding suggests that time serves to mitigate partisan bias in evaluating the Supreme Court. Ultimately this work details information concerned with responses to previous Court decisions, but also provides context clues for predicting various reactions to future controversial rulings.

This investigation is concerned with determining the impact of the United States Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision upon the state and federal courts. The first chapter discusses the background behind the 1973 decision and outlines the basic issues. The second chapter examines the decision's impact upon opinions in the federal courts and concludes that Rodriguez has become a significant precedent. While school finance reform is dormant in the federal tribunals as a result of the decision, the third chapter concludes that reform is still possible in the state courts. However, there has been a deceleration in the rate of cases overturning school funding statutes since 1973. The final chapter examines some of the state legislatures and concludes that statutory reform is not necessarily linked to action in the courts.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:25:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Renato Romeu Renck.pdf: 847067 bytes, checksum: cc4077af3099f7e2dd49656f8ce62b9e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-12-04 / This doctoral dissertation aims at checking if the Brazilian Supreme Court uses recurrent paradigms, determined from a specific and defined nucleolus of intelligibility, when judging parts involved in quantifying the tax base of the income tax for legal person. The Constitution through the concept of income, establishes limits to the taxing power which must be observed in order not to risk constitutional violation. To formulate such limits, it is paramount the formulation of a verifying procedure of what income means, to confront it with the standards determined by law. Through the jurisprudence research, structuring and reasoning of judicial theses, we want to investigate if the Supreme Federal Court establishes such limits. This reasoning must be present in decision making paradigms justified by rational criteria and accepted by the judicial community. We refute the structure of rationality which justifies the theory of the national tributary law by pointing out its flaws. We use the Hermeneutic Phenomenology which is the most adequate theory to the application of the institutional regulations and it also allows for the inference of the universal tributary concepts into single concepts. It defines the limits of each individual taxation. From the results of this research the following is justified: when the Supreme Court rejects as several judged antecedents and permits that the income be determined by the legislator, it is not taking into account the formation of a judging paradigm for the evaluation of income. As it states that the legislator has autonomy to determine what tribute income is for the legal person, the Federal Supreme Court renounces the constitutional duty to establish an applicable paradigm to the income evaluation procedure which institutes the limits to the power of tribute. Such renunciation empowers the legislator to institute whatever pleases him or her, removing from the context of the income tax any remains of the existence of the Rule of Law / A presente tese tem como objetivo verificar se a Suprema Corte brasileira adota paradigmas recorrentes determinados, firmados a partir de um núcleo de inteligibilidade específico e definido, quando julga processos de apuração e quantificação da base impositiva do imposto de renda pessoa jurídica. Para formular, em teses paradigmáticas, limites ao poder de tributar, impõe-se a pré-formulação de um procedimento verificatório do que é renda pelo STF, para confrontá-lo com os standards determinados pela lei. Busca-se verificar, pela pesquisa de jurisprudência e pela estruturação e fundamentação das teses jurídicas, se o STF estabelece tais limites e se repousam em paradigmas de decisões, justificados a partir de critérios racionais e aceitos pela comunidade jurídica. Refuta-se a estrutura de racionalidade, que justifica a teoria do direito tributário nacional, apontando suas deficiências e se adota a fenomenologia hermenêutica, que permite a inferência dos conceitos universais tributários em conceitos singulares; possibilitando concretizar os limites constitucionais em cada tributação individual. Pelo resultado da pesquisa justifica-se: o STF ao permitir que a renda seja livremente fixada pelo legislador, não apresenta um paradigma de julgamento em relação a um procedimento de verificação da renda. Portanto, ao afirmar que o legislador tem autonomia para estabelecer o que é renda tributável da pessoa jurídica, a Suprema Corte renunciou tacitamente ao seu dever constitucional, não estabelecendo um paradigma aplicável ao procedimento de apuração da base de cálculo do Imposto de Renda, que institua limites ao poder de tributar. Tal renúncia outorga ao legislador estabelecer o que quiser, removendo do contexto do imposto sobre a renda a existência do Estado de Direito