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Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on chief justices in the states, this study weighs their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. By assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years, Vining and Wilhelm are able to analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices and determine what factors influence the likelihood of success. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. Administering Justice also examines the chief justice position as an institution, provides a collective profile of its occupants, and surveys growing diversity among court leaders.

DISTINGUISHED PUBLICATION AWARD FOR THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION'S COMMUNICATION AND LAW DIVISION

The First Amendment: protected by law, threatened by fear in the Roberts Supreme Court.

In Fear and the First Amendment: Controversial Cases of the Roberts Court, Kevin A. Johnson and Craig R. Smith offer a deeply considered examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions. Bringing together literature on theories of fear in rhetorical and philosophical traditions, Johnson and Smith focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court, which form a pivotal era of dramatic precedents. Each chapter analyzes one or more First Amendment cases and a variety of related fears—whether evidentiary or not—that pertain to a given case.

These cases include Morse v. Frederick, which takes up the competing fears of school administrators’ loss of authority and students’ loss of free speech rights. The authors touch on corporate funding of elections in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, from the fear of corporate influence on electoral politics to corporate fears of alienating their consumers by backing political candidates. They explore religious freedom and fears of homosexuality in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Similarly, in Snyder v. Phelps, the authors delve further into fears of God, death, emotional distress, failing as a parent, and losing one’s reputation. Next, they investigate parents’ anxieties about violence in video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Finally, Johnson and Smith examine the role of fear in indecent, obscene, and graphic communication in three cases: FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, and United States v. Stevens.

Together these cases reveal fear to be an endemic factor in the rhetoric of First Amendment cases. This fascinating and original work will appeal to current legal practitioners and students of law, rhetoric, philosophy, and the First Amendment.
 

In order to be confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench, all district and circuit court nominees must appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing. Despite their relatively low profile, these lower court judges make up 99 percent of permanent federal judgeships and decide cases that relate to a wide variety of policy areas. To uncover why senators hold confirmation hearings for lower federal court nominees and the value of these proceedings more generally, the authors analyzed transcripts for all district and circuit court confirmation hearings between 1993 and 2012, the largest systematic analysis of lower court confirmation hearings to date. The book finds that the time-consuming practice of confirmation hearings for district and circuit court nominees provides an important venue for senators to advocate on behalf of their policy preferences and bolster their chances of being re-elected. The wide variation in lower court nominees’ experiences before the Judiciary Committee exists because senators pursue these goals in different ways, depending on the level of controversy surrounding a nominee. Ultimately, the findings inform a (re)assessment of the role hearings play in ensuring quality judges, providing advice and consent, and advancing the democratic values of transparency and accountability.

The American presidency has long tested the capacity of the system of checks and balances to constrain executive power, especially in times of war. While scholars have examined presidents starting military conflicts without congressional authorization or infringing on civil liberties in the name of national security, Stuart Streichler focuses on the conduct of hostilities. Using the treatment of war-on-terror detainees under President George W. Bush as a case study, he integrates international humanitarian law into a constitutional analysis of the repercussions of presidential war powers for human rights around the world.

Putting President Bush’s actions in a wider context, Presidential Accountability in Wartime begins with a historical survey of the laws of war, with particular emphasis on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunal. Streichler then reconstructs the decision-making process that led to the president’s approval of interrogation methods that violated Geneva’s mandate to treat wartime captives humanely. While taking note of various accountability options—from within the executive branch to the International Criminal Court—the book illustrates the challenge in holding presidents personally responsible for violating the laws of war through an in-depth analysis of the actions taken by Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public in response. In doing so, this book not only raises questions about whether international humanitarian law can moderate wartime presidential behavior but also about the character of the presidency and the American constitutional system of government.

The U.S. Supreme Court increasingly matters in American political life when those across the political spectrum look at the Court for relief from policies they oppose and as another venue for advancing their own policy agendas. However, the evidence is mounting, to include this book in a big way, that courts are more of a sideshow to the culture war. While court decisions, especially Supreme Court decisions, do have importance, the decisions emanating from the Court reflect social, cultural, and political change that occurred long prior to their decision ever being made.

This book tests how much political and social change has been made primarily through Gerald Rosenberg’s framework from his seminal work, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change, but it also utilizes Daniel Elazar’s Political Culture Theory to explain state level variations in political and social change. The findings indicate that while courts are not powerless institutions, reformers will not have success unless supported by the public and the elected branches, and most specifically, that preexisting state culture is a determining factor in the amount of change courts make. In short, federalism still matters.

A landmark sociological examination of terrorism prosecution in United States courts
 

Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. Terrorism on Trial examines the contemporary role that these courts play in the global war on terror and their use as a weapon of war: hunting, criminalizing, and punishing entire communities in the name of national security. 

Nicole Nguyen advocates for a rethinking of popular understandings of political violence and its root causes, encouraging readers to consider anti-imperial abolitionist alternatives to the criminalization, prosecution, and incarceration of individuals marked as real or perceived terrorists. She exposes how dominant academic discourses, geographical imaginations, and social processes have shaped terrorism prosecutions, as well as how our fundamental misunderstanding of terrorism has led to punitive responses that do little to address the true sources of violence, such as military interventions, colonial occupations, and tyrannical regimes. Nguyen also explores how these criminal proceedings bear on the lives of defendants and families, seeking to understand how legal processes unevenly criminalize and disempower communities of color.

A retheorization of terrorism as political violence, Terrorism on Trial invites readers to carefully consider the role of power and politics in the making of armed resistance, addressing the root causes of political violence, with a goal of building toward a less violent and more liberatory world.

In his forty years on the federal bench in Texas, William Wayne Justice has been a formidable force for change. His rulings have prompted significant institutional reforms in education, prisons, and racial relations, to name only a few areas of society in Texas and beyond that have been affected by Justice's work. For his labors, Judge Justice has received numerous awards, including the Outstanding Federal Trial Judge Award, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities of the American Bar Association, and the Morris Dees Justice Award from the University of Alabama School of Law.

This paperback reprint of William Wayne Justice chronicles his judicial career and the decisions he reached. It includes a new epilogue that describes Justice's move to Austin as a judge on senior status yet with a full caseload, tracks the long-running institutional reform cases to their conclusion, and examines the legacy of this remarkable and controversial jurist.