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Category Archives: Courts

Supreme Court Ideology and the Press

Andersen Jones, RonNell and West, Sonja, Supreme Court Ideology and the Press (March 15, 2024). University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2024-3, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4760952 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4760952
“Among the elected branches and the broader public, positivity toward the press skews deeply ideological. The data make clear that most liberals favor the press while conservatives ordinarily view it more negatively—a divide that has only deepened in recent years. Conventional wisdom holds that this is also true within the government’s third branch, with the liberal justices of the United States Supreme Court championing the work of the press while their conservative colleagues threaten to erode its protections. Prominent historical examples, like the liberal justices who advanced press freedom in New York Times v. Sullivan as a companion principle to broader democracy-engagement and social-justice issues, buoy up this perception. Recent calls from some conservative justices to unwind these longstanding safeguards for newsgatherers amplify it further. But the conventional wisdom is no longer true. Analysis of our dataset, coding the tone of every judicial opinion paragraph mentioning the press written by all 116 justices in the 235-year history of the Court, reveals a much more complicated relationship between the justices’ political ideologies and their attitudes toward the press. Mapping our data onto the ideology scores of justices throughout time does confirm that historically, ideology is highly correlated with a justice’s press positivity; but it also suggests that the once-vibrant liberal support for the press has disappeared. The current Court has entered an overall press-unfriendly period in which even those justices whose ideology would have predicted press friendliness a generation ago are less likely to be positive about the press. This Article explores those trends. It shows how the data deconstruct the myth of modern liberal judicial support for the press, examines how ideology has become a poorer predictor of press positivity, and explains how today’s less press-friendly Court has, over time, displaced the press-friendly Court of past generations. It reports and investigates a series of interrelated trends that reveal increasing negativity from the Court’s conservatives alongside an apparent gravitational pull toward press unfriendliness that now seems to keep even the current Court’s most liberal justices—who would have gone out of their way to praise the press or the press function a half century ago —from positively characterizing the press today. It also shows how the data belie some potential and initially appealing explanations for this decline, concluding that support for the press is simply no longer a meaningful component of liberalism on the Court. It has been decoupled from other liberal principles with which it once was connected. For most of the Court’s modern history, liberal judicial ideology included press positivity. Today, it does not.”

Review – Law Democratized: A Blueprint For Solving The Justice Crisis

Via LLRX – Review – Law Democratized: A Blueprint For Solving The Justice Crisis – Jerry Lawson rhetorically asks Is anyone in the country better qualified than Renee Knake Jefferson to write about access to justice? Professor of Law at the University of Houston, co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services,… Continue Reading

FBI Crime Data Explorer

“The Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s dynamic solution to presenting crime data in a more immediate venue that reflects the constant change in the nation’s crime circumstance. The CDE pages provide a view of estimated national and state data, reported agency-level crime statistics, and graphs of specific variables… Continue Reading

Here’s the U.S. Government’s Antitrust Case Against Apple

404 Media: “Thursday [March 21, 2024], the Department of Justice and 16 states filed a massive, years-long antitrust case against Apple. Ahead of the DOJ’s press conference, 404 Media has obtained the full suit from PACER, the federal legal database. As a public service, we are providing the document here: We have not yet reviewed… Continue Reading

Publishers’ reply brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive: First Impressions

Dave Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney jointly authored this post. They are also the authors of a White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books. We are not, as the Publishers claim in their brief on page 13, a “cadre of boosters.” We wrote the paper independently as part of our combined decades of work… Continue Reading

Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008–2022

Fact sheet for the report Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008–2022, published March 13, 2024: “A Brennan Center study of nearly 1 billion voter file data points finds the following: The nationwide racial turnout gap — the difference in voting rates between white… Continue Reading

Illinois Task Force Explores How AI Could Speed Up Litigation

Bloomberg: “Generative artificial intelligence could boost the Illinois judiciary by helping judges produce opinions faster and assist individuals in better preparing their own cases, members of a new Illinois AI task force said. The Illinois Judicial Conference task force, created in January, is meeting monthly to discuss how generative AI could help the court system… Continue Reading

Amicus Lobbying: Friends of the Court or Friends of the Industry?

Bunting, William and Stein, Tomer, Amicus Lobbying: Friends of the Court or Friends of the Industry? (January 29, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4708986 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4708986  – “This Article reveals that lobbying has a vast and outsized impact on the development of judge-made business law. Lobby groups have taken control of the amicus curiae filing process… Continue Reading

Fetal personhood laws, explained

Vox: “The Alabama Supreme Court touched off a nationwide furor in February when it ruled that frozen, fertilized embryos legally count as “children.” The ruling upended the lives of patients undergoing IVF in Alabama and opened up a new front in the post-Dobbs battle over abortion rights. It also revived interest in — and concern… Continue Reading

Supreme Court Inadvertently Reveals Confounding Late Change in Trump Ballot Ruling

Slate: “The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to keep Donald Trump on Colorado’s ballot was styled as a unanimous one without any dissents. But the metadata tells a different story. On the page, a separate opinion by the liberal justices is styled as a concurrence in the judgment, authored jointly by the trio. In the… Continue Reading