It is an old story: the courts are behind in their work. What is wrong? A problem of management? This book opens with a passage from an address by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger of the United States Supreme Court delivered a few years ago at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association: "[T]oday, in the final third of this century, we are still trying to operate the courts with fundamentally the same basic methods, the same procedures and the same machinery that Roscoe Pound said were not good enough in 1906. In the supermarket age we are with few exceptions operating the courts with cracker-barrel, corner-grocer methods and equipment, vintage 1900. ... More money and more judges alone is not the primary solution to the problem of the courts. Some of what is wrong is due to the failure to apply the techniques of modern business to the purely mechanical operation of the court--of modern record keeping and systems planning for handling the movement of the cases. Some is also due to antiquated and rigid procedures Which not only permit delay but encourage it".
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of administrative law. Topics include judicial review of administrative determinations, rule making and adjudicatory powers, and the investigatory power.
Judicial Politics in the United States examines the role of courts as policymaking institutions and their interactions with the other branches of government and other political actors in the U.S. political system. Not only does this book cover the nuts and bolts of the functions, structures and processes of our courts and legal system, it goes beyond other judicial process books by exploring how the courts interact with executives, legislatures, and state and federal bureaucracies. It also includes a chapter devoted to the courts' interactions with interest groups, the media, and general public opinion and a chapter that looks at how American courts and judges interact with other judiciaries around the world. Judicial Politics in the United States balances coverage of judicial processes with discussions of the courts' interactions with our larger political universe, making it an essential text for students of judicial politics.
"The following dissertation advances methodological aspects of American bureaucratic and judicial politics. Each of the following three papers focus on developing methodological approaches to those subject areas specifically with respect to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text-as-data. The main contributions of each paper are methodological in nature. First, I create a new text-based preference scaling algorithm for estimating United States Supreme Court preferences using text and network analysis. Despite widespread acceptance of text-based methods for scaling the ideological preferences of political actors, only two text-based models find widespread use: Wordfish and Wordscores. Using network-derived features to identify multiple Supreme Court issue areas and the text of Supreme Court opinions, I develop a new model for estimating the latent ideological preferences, of Supreme Court justices improving and extending Wordfish. This new model integrates new advances in network analysis and community detection algorithms to introduce multi-dimensional preferences into one comprehensive model for Supreme Court decisions. For Freedom of Speech, Search and Seizure, and Commerce Clause cases, I compare the predictive efficacy of estimates derived by the commonly used Wordfish algorithm and my own for Supreme Court cases between 1969-2003. This methods presents a way to estimate preferences from opinions even from cases on which votes are unanimous. Second, I identify key structural and ideological motivations on the U.S. National Labor Relations Board. Bureaucrat and agency preferences, and the policy choices that bureaus make, are crucial for myriad theoretical models and empirical analyses. While measuring such preferences has proven problematic, recently a number of scholars have provided alternatives for estimating these features. However, efforts have generally not included advances in text-based analysis, despite the potential for employing written records to develop rich, dynamic, estimates. To remedy this omission, we utilize and build upon text-based scaling methods to estimate the ideological and partisan preferences of key decision-makers and case decisions for a canonical agency long-studied by policy scholars: the National Labor Relations Board. Specifically, we create a comprehensive, text-based, database of Board decisions from 1947-2015. Using text analysis, we find that member preferences must be separated by case type, i.e., assuming that there we can combine such decisions in generating preference scores is not warranted. We also show that our preferences measures do well compared to alternatives, such as those solely using Item Response Theory, when we estimate models with preferences and forces internal and external to the agency to explain outputs. Finally, we find structural effects on the agency's decision content over time using change-point analysis. Finally, I leverage tools from Natural Language Processing to create an ideological common space between the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and Appeals Courts. Comparable ideological preferences across United States Federal institutions are fundamental to understanding the interplay of political preferences and power across those institutions. Two decades of work has encouraged the creation of ideological scores in the bureaucracy, Congress, and the Supreme Court. These scores have largely either been focused narrowly on easily observable and quantifiable institutional behavior such as roll-call votes or focusing on observable behavior that relates to the private political preferences of judges, Supreme Court justices, and members of Congress. To facilitate the creation of a legal common space, I employ textbased information retrieval and sentimental analysis techniques to create a new set of bridge observations between members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and Federal Court of Appeals and District Court judges. Utilizing this new set of bridge observations, I develop a new legal common space using sentiment of legal and judicial citations as votes to estimate the political ideal points of the entire U.S. Federal Judiciary and members of Congress from 1980 to 2012. These scores are then validated by examining the spatial arrangement of these scores relative to political party and comparing to more recent attempts at creating common space scores."--Pages viii-x.
This classic text, originally published in 1948, is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.The objectives of The Administrative State are to assist students of administration to view their subject in historical perspective and to appraise the theoretical content of their literature. It is also hoped that this book may assist students of American culture by illuminating an important development of the first half of the twentieth century. It thus should serve political scientists whose interests lie in the field of public administration or in the study of bureaucracy as a political issue; the public administrator interested in the philosophic background of his service; and the historian who seeks an understanding of major governmental developments.This study, now with a new introduction by public policy and administration scholar Hugh Miller, is based upon the various books, articles, pamphlets, reports, and records that make up the literature of public administration, and documents the political response to the modern world that Graham Wallas named the Great Society. It will be of lasting interest to students of political science, government, and American history.
