Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Affirmative Action’s Road Doesn’t Pass Through Perfection

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
supreme-court-building

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion soon on the first affirmative action case it has heard since mumbling (or not) its way through a decision on the Grutter v. Bollinger case a decade ago. The justices heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin last October. The plaintiff, a spurned white applicant to UTA, argued that including race, even tangentially, in its admission process was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Were a court majority to agree, it would essentially overturn Grutter, which had allowed race to be included in a basket of admissions standards ... Read More

More like this: Education, Politics
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Expect Gay Marriages in the Courthouse, Not the Statehouse

March 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Parisians protest against the legislature's "marriage and adoption for all" draft law in January. The girl's placard reads, "I know where I come from; I wonder where we're going." (PHOTO: ANDREY MALGIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ah, liberal France, with its 35-hour work weeks, powerful unions, and ... massive anti-marriage equality rallies. With the Gallic legislature likely to legalize gay marriage next month, at least 300,000 marched in opposition. Even so, civil rights legislation guaranteeing marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples has already passed the country's lower house, and is nearly certain to gain full approval in France. The march—which ended with police deploying tear gas—was a useful reminder that European social politics are not as simple as they can seem from across the ... Read More

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Bowling Alone at the Supreme Court

August 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

What happens when your findings get away from you? In 2007, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, most famously the author of the book Bowling Alone, released findings from a huge survey of some 26,200 people in 41 different American communities in a paper called "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century." For Putnam, a great believer in pluralism but also in the value of civic engagement, the survey's results were awkward to deliver: "The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined," Putnam summarized. "It’s not just that we don’t trust ... Read More

More like this: Education, The 101, Uncategorized
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Will Obamacare Ruling Swing Public Opinion? History Says It May.

June 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Democrats and Republicans are furiously trying to rally public opinion to their respective sides, following the Supreme Court ruling that largely upheld the Affordable Care Act as constitutional. The intense political maneuvering raises a key question: Does this sort of definitive legal decision influence voters’ views on the issue at hand? One very high-profile example—the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which effectively legalized abortion—suggests the answer is yes. At least, that’s the conclusion of a recently published study, which finds the court’s action appears to have ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Health, Legal Affairs
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Rejecting Term Limits for the Supreme Court

April 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Today’s U.S. Supreme Court justices, critics cry, are serving longer than ever (darned improved life expectancy!). And because these people just won’t go away, the court risks becoming an institution where ideological swings have long-lasting impact (or damage), and where present decisions are made by justices grounded in the past. So legal scholars and amateur court watchers are at it again, agitating for the end of life terms on the nation’s highest court. One oft-quoted and particularly alarming statistic, from Northwestern’s Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren, shows that ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, The Idea Lobby
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Can Obamacare Win by Losing at Highest Court?

March 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

As day two of the U.S. Supreme Court’s epic three-day examination of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) came to a close, the general consensus -- from left and right--seems to be that the government’s lawyer failed to convince any of the five right-of-center justices to uphold the individual mandate alongside the court’s four left-of-center justices. The contrast between Paul Clement’s sterling performance challenging the mandate and the pointed questions from justices that marred Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s stumbling defense (here’s a funny ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Legal Affairs
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Can the Supreme Court Survive a Health-Care Decision?

March 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Partisanship and Support for the U.S. Supreme Court

Legitimacy is for losers. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will announce one of its most important decisions since its ruling in Bush v. Gore. The decision in the cases — all having to do with the constitutionality of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — likely will have vast political consequences, perhaps well beyond health care itself. The court will also decide a number of other blockbuster cases in 2012, from the highly polarized Arizona immigration legislation (whether people can be stopped by the police and interrogated about their immigration status) to the question of ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs
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Supreme Court Calls For New Try on Texas Districts

January 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The U.S. Supreme Court has opted out of messing with Texas, at least for now. In a unanimous, unsigned decision, the judges avoided a variety of thorny  legal questions, vaguely asking for revisions to a redistricting map drawn by a panel of judges in San Antonio. At stake is the likely party alignment of four new congressional seats that were awarded to Texas after the 2010 census revealed significant, minority-driven population growth in the state. The Republican-controlled Texas state Legislature’s map all but ensured at least three of those new seats would be safely Republican, ... Read More

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Making a Case for Televising the Supreme Court

November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Over the years, media advocacy groups and news outlets have jotted off letters to the Supreme Court pleading for a basic form of access their counterparts in other democracies already have: cameras in the country’s highest courtroom. The response has always been the same, but with varying explanations. Cameras would be too obtrusive. The wires and equipment would get in everyone’s way. Filming the court would turn it into a circus. The whole demeanor of the place would change. Justice David Souter summed up all of this with a jurist’s eloquence: “I can tell you the day you see a ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, The Idea Lobby
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A Politicized Supreme Court Doesn’t Faze the Public?

September 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This week, the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law that has divided the country (and, until now, federal appeals court judges). The request sets up what likely will be a legal showdown in the coming high court term — right in the thick of a presidential election. And it promises to be a particularly eventful case: critics on the left want Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself because of his wife’s activism opposing the law, while critics on the right want Elena Kagan to do the same because of her earlier job as the ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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