Judicial Federalism: Federal vs. State Courts PDF

Judicial federalism Federal vs. state courts o Structure of court system o Judiciary Act of 1789 - SCOTUS purposes: final court of appeal, judicial review - Stare decisis, precedent, writ of certiorari, rule of four - SCOTUS process → petition for cert, conference/vote, cert granted, brief filed, or...

Judicial federalism Federal vs. state courts o Structure of court system o Judiciary Act of 1789 - SCOTUS purposes: final court of appeal, judicial review - Stare decisis, precedent, writ of certiorari, rule of four - SCOTUS process → petition for cert, conference/vote, cert granted, brief filed, oral arguments (public), conference meeting (private), majority vote, majority opinion, dissenting and concurring opinions - Process for appointing justices & political limits on the Court - SCOTUS statutory and constitutional interpretation - Models justices use (textualism, intentionalism, living document, originalism) - Theoretical models for judicial decision-making: legal, attitudinal, strategic - Civil rights versus liberties (definition and examples) o Civil liberties: Bill of Rights, due process, Habeus corpus, Bill of Attainder, ex post facto law, impairment of contracts o Civil rights: Based on Reconstruction Amendments (13, 14, 15) o Incorporation - Bureaucracy, bureaucratic capture, iron triangle, revolving door - Mandatory vs. discretionary federal spending - Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, and non-defense spending - Theory of responsible party government - Divided government - Bounded rationality - What political parties do (recruit political candidates, attempt to win elections, organize governance and opposition) - Political party organization (national committees, Hill committees, state organizations, local organizations) - No parties in the Constitution - Duverger’s Law (including single member district vs. multi-member district, plurality voting) Organized interests / interest groups o Economic interests (corporations and business interests, labor), citizen’s groups (public interest groups, single-issue groups, ideological groups, demographic groups), government interests o Similarities and differences to political parties o Strategies (lobbying (inside and outside), donating money, going public, litigation, protesting) - PACs (political action committees) and Super PACs - Citizen’s United v. FEC (2010) - Hard money (direct contributions to a campaign) versus soft money (independent expenditures; both PACs and Super PACs) in campaign spending) - Mass media (forms, roles) o Framing and priming o The partisan (vs. independent) press o Yellow Journalism, muckraking o Fairness doctrine, culture of objectivity o Telecommunications Act of 1996 – media consolidation o Types of bias (ideological, gatekeeping, coverage) o Disinformation and fake news - Australian ballot vs. party ballots (for voting) - Split ticket voting - Primary elections (and types: closed, open to unaffiliated, open, top two) - Caucuses - Amendments to who can vote in U.S. o 15th Amendment: Right to vote shall not be denied on account of race o 19th Amendment: Right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex - Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, voter intimidation (violence and lynchings) - Voting Rights Act of 1965 o Preclearance; no discriminatory tests; coverage formula o Backlash to the VRA (e.g., at large elections, appointments, purging voter rolls, exact match laws, shutting down or moving polling locations, racial gerrymandering, voter ID laws, limiting early voting, felon disenfranchisement) o Shelby County v. Holder (2013) o Voting reforms that increase access: early voting, same day registration (and that is benefits young people most), vote by mail, automatic voter registration, youth preregistration, online voter registration - Gerrymandering Districts drawn – usually by state legislatures (sometimes independent commissions) o Reapportionment (based on the Census) o Redistricting o Apportionment Act of 1842 (compact and contiguous) Partisan and racial (positive vs. negative) gerrymandering o Cracking, packing, hijacking, kidnapping - Public opinion - Sampling (population vs. sample, inference) - Non-random sampling (e.g., quota sampling), random/probability sampling, - Issues with surveys and polls o Social desirability bias o Sampling bias o Pros and cons of telephone vs. internet surveys - Single sided question vs. two-sided question - Close-ended vs. open-ended question - Double-barreled questions; ambiguous questions; leading questions - Response rates, margin of error, polling averages