Author Archive | Guest Blogger

[Starting again with some brief responses to my engaged and engaging audience. Many thanks to the reader who said, correctly, I did not mean to imply race played no part in voter preferences in the South — or anywhere else. But, again, I would urge readers to take care in charging racism. Obama ran eleven […]

[Note to my lively, thoughtful readers: Your remarks deserve longer responses than I have room for. Very briefly, I agree with the comment: “Since the political makeup tends to correlate at least somewhat with the racial makeup, it is frequently difficult to distinguish these two things,” and I do talk about the issue in my […]

[Note to readers who have responded so thoughtfully to my previous posts. A number of issues raised will be addressed in this and my subsequent two posts. For instance, I do talk about the collaboration between the Republican Party and the civil rights groups in this post. In fact, I was the first — in […]

Over time, the Voting Rights Act morphed in an unanticipated direction — a change that had both benefits and costs. The act’s original vision was one that all decent Americans shared: racial equality in the American polity. Blacks would be free to form political coalitions and choose candidates in the same manner as other citizens. […]

First and foremost, much gratitude to Eugene Volokh for creating space for me on his splendid, indispensable blog. Voting Rights — and Wrongs is my second effort to understand a statute that has become, in the words of Richard Pildes, “one of the most ambitious legislative efforts in the world to define the appropriate balance […]

The central thrust of my arguments and analysis to this point has been that the U.S. Supreme Court enjoys a broad and deep reservoir of goodwill that allows it to get it decisions – even controversial and unpopular ones – to stick. That has probably not been true of the Court throughout American history, and […]

In Part 1 of this discussion I set out a conundrum grounded in earlier research on public attitudes toward courts: Either knowledge does not produce a realistic understanding of decision making, or legitimacy may not depend upon citizens being duped into believing in theories of mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality. Here, I provide […]

According to the theory of positivity bias (Gibson and Caldeira,2009, Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations) the institutional legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court is enhanced by exposure to the legitimizing symbols of law – robes, deference, temples, etc. But do these symbols teach an erroneous view of how judges make decisions? Judicial symbolism is often associated […]

Our evidence is that ordinary people know far more about the Supreme Court than has heretofore been thought. [For those of you interested in the statistics see the Journal of Politics article

I greatly appreciate the opportunity Eugene has provided to chat a bit about some research in which Greg Caldeira and I have long been engaged. That work concerns the institutional legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court. We have conducted numerous projects over the years, currently have a survey of public opinion in the field connected […]

of the following passage: The judge’s proper task is not mechanical. “History,” Cardinal Newman reminded us, “is not a creed or a catechism, it gives lessons rather than rules.” No body of doctrine is born fully developed. That is as true of constitutional law as it is of theology. The provisions of the Constitution state […]

In the late 1720s the Caribbean pirates

An increasingly common claim to hear is that the Somali pirates are just attempting to right the wrongs of greedy multinationals and others who, since Somalia

In the course of doing interviews on The Invisible Hook over the last several weeks I

Despite the surge in Somali piracy and encouragement from some employees of the U.S. government, commercial ships aren