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One of the more effective tools corporations have to affect the business environment is litigation. If a company cannot secure effective regulation in the political environment of Congress and legislatures, it can strategically challenge administrative agency rulings in the courts. This element of business political strategy, as a follow-on to the more traditional elements of strategy in the institutional environment, has often been overlooked in the literature. This paper examines the role of judicial ideology in affecting the selection and outcome of regulatory cases companies bring to litigation. Using a dataset on Federal Communications Commission orders and trials from 1990 to 1995, this paper shows that changes in the make-up of the bench of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affects not only who wins the cases, but also the cases selected for litigation. Specifically, firms are more likely to bring cases when the agency decisions are ideologically distant from the bench than when the two are actors are close ideologically. Judges, who are subsequently randomly selected, vote ideologically as the firms' actions predict they will, with Republican judges overturning Democratic agency decisions and vice versa. However, the shifts in behavior of the firms are larger than the shifts in the behavior of the court. Integrating political science perspectives into the litigation decisions of companies can enhance our understanding of the business political strategies of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper on political litigation challenging the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Orlando, Florida from January 3-5, 2013, is presented. Topics discussed include challenges imposed on the constitutionality of the ACA, the 2012 Supreme Court case Sebelius v. The National Federation of Independent Business and lawsuits on Medicaid expansion.

There can be no denying the profound changes in U.S. campaign financing since the U.S. Supreme Court's January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Nevertheless, there has been confusion about the extent to which the decision should be seen as the primary explanation for what has occurred. This paper begin to disentangle the strands through an analysis of independent expenditures in elections at the state level in 2006 and 2010 from new data gathered and supplied by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The paper's findings tend not to support some key claims being made on both sides of the contemporary political debate surrounding independent spending. First, contrary to statements made by some of the decision's critics, we find that Citizens' United itself did not have a noticeable direct effect on independent spending in 2010 - although this could, of course, change. Increases were more or less comparable in states that prohibited corporate spending before the decision and those that did not. However, the paper also addresses one of the claims normally associated with the opposite side of the political spectrum. It is often said that limiting contributions to the political parties (ending "soft money") has displaced party money, increasing independent spending by unaccountable non-party organizations. We find that party contribution limits have indeed displaced some party independent spending in the years and states we studied. However, the displacement has been not been toward ideological groups, umbrella organizations or vaguely defined party networks, but rather toward national organizations of state elected and party officials who are acting as party organizations in all but the most formal sense of that term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many decades, Supreme Court justices and legal scholars have argued over the validity of different tools in constitutional interpretation, including social science data, public opinion and, most recently, laws and standards of decency from abroad. Although several of those currently on the bench maintain that foreign laws have no place in American constitutional adjudication, the larger universe in which their institution operates has become increasingly transnational since the end of the Cold War. The term judicial transnationalism has been coined to describe this phenomenon, characterized by unprecedented levels of interaction and exchange between foreign courts and legal activists. This paper examines these changes, evaluating the extent to which they have resulted in higher levels or new forms of foreign and transnational participation and interest in Supreme Court cases. In doing so, it tests a common observation made about the effect of judicial globalization in the U.S. context: that because of the increasingly complex and global nature of legal structures, the Supreme Court is more likely to hear cases that involve some form of foreign or international law. By analyzing the litigant and amicus briefs filed in all cases from the 1979-1980, 1989-1990, 1999-2000, and 2009-2010 dockets, this paper attempts to determine if there has indeed been an increase in the presence of foreign law arguments made in briefs filed to the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I begin to examine the nature of the relationship between state court decisions and the legal issue of environmental standing. Prior to the 1970s, standing rules stood as a barrier keeping many environmental groups out of the courts. The consequences were profound, and the federal courts' standing rules were a hurdle to the advancement of environmental policy. After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Sierra Club v. Morton, environmental interest groups have achieved more success in standing disputes in federal courts, ushering in a new era of environmental litigation and policy advancement. Despite the extreme importance of standing as a hurdle to environmental litigation, these changes in standing policy have generated very little research to date. In this paper, I present a very initial look at how environmental interest groups have fared in standing disputes in California state courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the redistricting revolution of the 1960's, which began with a series of Supreme Court decisions that forced states to draw equally populated districts for the U.S. House and state legislative chambers, the standards for Congress and legislative districts have evolved over time. Today's standards call for virtually no population deviations for congressional districts, though legislative districts can typically deviate up to 10 percent. In practice this means that districts can vary by as much as five percent above and below the ideal population within a state. In this paper I demonstrate that these population deviations are a simple tool for those that redraw electoral boundaries to create a partisan gerrymander. If one party controls the redistricting process, districts from the opposite party are typically over populated and districts favoring the party in control are usually under populated. I demonstrate this phenomenon using data from 47 states after the 2000 round of redistricting. The paper concludes with a discussion on why that courts ought to abolish the "10-percent" rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in releasing its 2018 Fiscal Year Report noted several impressive accomplishments included tackling of a number of operational challenges, resolving a number of lawsuits, and securing over $500 million in damages for victims of discrimination. The majority of damages recovered, $354 million, were recovered via mediation, conciliation, and settlements. $53.5 million came through litigation, and $98.6 million for federal employees and applicants in hearings and appeals. The agency handled over a half a million calls and emails and handled over 200,000 inquiries concerning allegations of discrimination. The agency resolved 141 lawsuits and filed an additional 199 lawsuits on behalf of individuals alleging discrimination in employment. The agency focused on promoting awareness on two issues in particular, the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and age discrimination in employment. In the year ahead, the agency has pledged to increase its role as an enforcer, educator, and leader in combatting all forms of workplace harassment. While the agency reported some impressive accomplishments, one area that did not receive attention was the number of complaints dismissed by the agency. This has been, over the years, a statistic the agency has chosen not to clearly address. The purpose of the paper is to review the EEOC accomplishments for fiscal year 2018 and examine what employers can expect in 2019. The paper will examine the basis of EEOC complaints and the number of complaints that are determined to have no reasonable cause. Over the years, on average, over two-thirds of all charges received by the EEOC are determined to have no reasonable cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the quizzical discovery that the media routinely described Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as a moderate at the time she retired from service at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. Despite being the architect of the intellectual framework in Casey that would later help to dismantle Roe v. Wade's central premise and invite a new, radical strategy from anti-abortion forces, when she left the bench the Court's first woman occupant was heralded as a "centrist," "moderate," and "swing voter." How Justice O'Connor came to be understood in this light is the subject of this paper. Using media analysis, the paper argues that Justice O'Connor was publicly constructed as a moderate mid-way through her tenure on the high court. Setting this public understanding of the Justice alongside her development of the "undue burden" standard and that standard's implications in the 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart case, I argue that the public persona of the justice does not reflect accurately her ideological place on the court, and was constructed by media and interest groups alike just as the justice's conservative impact on reproductive rights was unfolding. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 3rd, 1993, 30,000 indigenous and settler residents of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against Texaco for "environmental crimes" resulting from the company's petroleum production and dumping activities in the region. Although this case Aguinda vs. Texaco, Inc. intially appeared to represent a historic move for indigenous communities, ten years and mountains of litigation later, the challenges of indigenous groups against this petroleum behemoth have been all but squashed under the weight of the company's bottomless legal and public relations resources, as well as the political instability of the Ecuadorian Republic and its judiciary, revealing the challenges of such litigation. The aim of this paper is two fold. First, to renew scholarly attention in the Aguinda case and the obstacles encountered by non-state actors seeking social justice through international law as evidenced throughout the proceedings of this case. Second, to suggest to students of Aguinda that understanding this case and its obstacles requires greater attention to the concept of power and that a fruitful encounter for reexaming this case may be found through an engagement with political science's debate on this concept. Throughout this paper, I make the case for re-examining this case from the "perspective of power", a perspective that for theorists of power suggests the importance of translating and perhaps rethinking our insights towards an understanding of the movements of power in our globalized world. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how we should perceive the Double Nexus Test from Flast v. Cohen (1968). Is it a rigid test that must be met for federal taxpayers to have standing in federal courts, or is it merely a loose set of guidelines? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper will describe court decisions citing Bush v. Gore as authority [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dahl (1957) proposed that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision-making was an extension of the policy-making agenda of the ‘governing national coalition.’ Only recently has this view been applied to the study of the Court (e.g. Chen 2002; Gillman 2002; Powe 2000). Despite scholarly recognition that conservatism has had an enormous impact on American politics and public policy over the last thirty years, little research examines the extent of that influence on the policy-making of the federal courts (but see Keck 2004). This paper seeks to understand Supreme Court decision-making, in particular the Rehnquist Court's recent federalism decisions, by examining influences beyond the justices' own policy preferences, by looking at the ideology of the Republican coalitions that consciously promoted judicial restraint and greater respect for federalism, and which viewed the courts as key instruments of national policy-making (Gillman 2002; Peretti 1999). I locate the source of the Rehnquist Court's recent federalism decisions within the strategic and systematic effort of conservatives in the Reagan and first Bush administration who sought to push the Court's agenda to the right. Conservative leaders and activists were successful in institutionalizing a conservative agenda in the federal courts by engaging in the following activities: (1) using public rhetoric to promote a view of limited government and respect for federalism; (2) staffing key policy-making agencies, in particular the Department of Justice, with people who firmly believed in and advocated on behalf of limiting government and the intrusion of federal courts into arenas of legislative policy-making; and (3) institutionalizing greater executive control over the federal judicial appointment process so as to appoint conservative judges who believed in judicial restraint and respect for federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing complexity of federal courts’ dockets and continuing political controversy surrounding tort litigation have highlighted the importance of trial judges’ treatment of scientific expert testimony. While federal trial judges have been empowered for over a century to determine the conditions under which certain kinds of evidence would be deemed admissible, the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993) refined and redefined the trial judge’s responsibility to determine whether expert scientific evidence is suitable for presentation to a jury. In Daubert, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the trial judge’s role as a gatekeeper responsible for scrutinizing such evidence, and it specified certain guidelines that would inform judges’ decisions about admissibility. These guidelines supplanted the previous rule that admissibility decisions would hinge on whether the scientific technique underpinning an expert’s testimony was "generally accepted" as reliable in the relevant scientific community (the Frye test). Daubert was influential in several ways. It sparked a contrast between the judicial gatekeeping function with regard to scientific expert testimony, and the general preference of the Federal Rules of Evidence--Rule 702 in particular--to admit potentially relevant evidence. It also increased the judge’s role, at the expense of the jury’s, in determining admissibility. Furthermore, the expanded gatekeeping role set forth in Daubert placed additional demands on trial judges, who as a group lack specialized expertise concerning the scientific component of the disputes being adjudicated. What has been less clear is whether Daubert has made trial judges less willing to admit scientific expert testimony. Daubert stressed the need for judges to make independent assessments of the quality of the expert’s scientific evidence, and some observers (see, e.g., Faigman et al. 2000) have argued that judges subsequently defer to experts less than they did when the Frye standard of scientific consensus determined admissibility. At the same time, however, Daubert’s mandate might open the courthouse doors to theories and methodologies that are too new or too specialized to have been peer-reviewed or otherwise subjected to the scientific community’s scrutiny (Fenner 1996). As such, Daubert could have a liberalizing effect. This paper will determine what effect, if any, Daubert has had on federal trial judges’ willingness to admit scientific expert testimony. To test the expectation that Daubert has had some effect, I will perform a logit analysis of federal district judges’ admissibility rulings in tort cases following Daubert and preceding Daubert by ten years. The analysis will control for judges’ ideology (measured by the party of the appointing president), litigant characteristics, and, to determine whether strategic considerations have affected trial judges’ decision making, likelihood of reversal by an appellate panel (measured by the probability that a randomly selected three-judge panel will have a majority sharing the trial judge’s partisan affiliation). This design enables me to isolate any effects produced by the change in legal doctrine in Daubert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically scholars have maintained that the Court does not produce significant social or political transformations--absent intervening actors and/or circumstances (Rosenberg 1991). More recent studies (e.g. Canon and Johnson 1999; Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997) acknowledge a greater role by the Court in influencing society. Canon and Johnson's (1999) four populations model recognizes that the force of judicial impact within a policy area often reflects the readiness of a decision's interpreters, implementers, consumers, and others to accept that decision. Thus, the Court has audiences, and depending how each audience reacts to a judicial decision there may be a considerable impact on society. Furthermore, a decision does not have to have a direct impact in order to bring about change. If a Court decision forces the attention of other government actors to an issue, then the Court is a significant agenda setting institution (Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997). Therefore, agenda setting might be the mechanism by which the Court influences American politics and society. This paper explores the relationship between Supreme Court's decisions and congressional action. Using the Harold Spaeth's (2003) Supreme Court Database, we selected Supreme Court decisions that overturned federal government actions and categorized the decisions according to the policy area they impacted. Next, with the help of the Congressional Hearing Data from the Policy Agendas Project, we determined the number of congressional hearings within the issue areas covered by the Court decisions for time periods before and after the Court decision. The study used an interrupted time-series regression to explore whether congressional hearings in a policy area significantly increase in the wake of the Court decisions. Previous research on this topic has had the propensity to only focus on highly publicized cases. By selecting decisions based on whether they overturned federal law will minimize this... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine state court responses to U.S. Supreme Court remands. I look at cases that have been successfully appealed to the Supreme Court to see if the winning party prevails at the state court on remand. If they do win, I label this as deferential behavior by the state court. When a case is remanded from the U.S. Supreme Court, the state courts do not have to defer. Instead, they can avoid doing so in a number of ways, including denying that the points raised by the Court affect their decision and invoking their state constitution. I test a number of hypotheses generated by four theories of judicial behavior (simple legal, simple attitudinal, persuasion and strategic) that predict different effects of the strength of the Supreme Court mandate on the state court response. I operationalize the strength of the mandate using the number of justices joining the majority opinion and the number and type of separate opinions written in the case. I control for the form of the remand order, the level of the state court, whether the case is before or after Michigan v. Long, whether the case concerns an economic issue, whether the Court's ruing is per curiam and whether the Supreme Court opinion is more liberal than the original state court decision. I test these hypotheses on all of the cases successfully appealed from the state courts to the Supreme Court from the 1970 to 2000 terms with published state court responses. If the strength of mandate does indeed affect the way in which state courts treat remands from the Court, then it could mean that individual justices have an important role to play in determining whether or not state courts follow the U.S. Supreme Court. I find that there is evidence to support the importance of mandate strength effects, although the nature of the effect is itself surprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]