Robert M Howard
Biographic Data
| ID | 3846382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert M Howard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert M |
| FAMILY NAME | Howard |
| SIGNATURE | HOWARD R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgia State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 211 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Judging Inequality
Journal Article Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis by James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson Get access James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2021. 356 pp. $35.00. Robert M Howard Robert M Howard Georgia State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad063, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad063 Published: 2…
Leaders and Followers
Much of the state court literature assumes that decisions reached by state courts of last resort are independent of other state courts of last resort. Each state court has its own ideology as well as a particular set of institutional constraints and confronts different governors, publics, and state legislatures in rendering decisions. Scholarly research and its assumption of the independence of state‐level judicial decision making and policy impa…
Judicial Independence
In this article, we directly test the presence of judicial independence by examining judicial recess appointees who have later been confirmed by the Senate to full‐time Article III judicial positions. Specifically, we compare the votes of recess‐appointed courts of appeals judges during their temporary appointment tenure with a similar period following Senate confirmation. We find substantial differences in pre‐ and postconfirmation voting, sugge…
The Labor of Judging
There has been significant scholarly research on judicial decision making and bureaucratic control but little research on bureaucrats who perform a judicial function, namely, administrative law judges. In this article, we analyze the influences on the decisions of administrative law judges (ALJs) from 1991 to 2006. Using ordered logit, we examine the influence of policy preference and hierarchical and political constraint. We find that ALJs are c…
Ignoring Advice and Consent? The Uses of Judicial Recess Appointments
The authors seek to answer the questions of why presidents use the power to temporarily seat federal court judges during recesses of the Senate. The use of the recess power can upset the carefully calculated separation of powers envisioned by the framers, shifting power away from one branch of government toward another. Examining every judicial recess appointment from 1789 to 2004, the authors discover that presidents are conditionally strategic …
State Policy Innovation in Perspective
Why and when courts will change policy has been the subject of significant scholarly attention, but there has been little effort to integrate this research within the existing research of determinants of state legislative policy change. In this article, the authors incorporate both of these research areas to answer the question of whether policy change will occur through the legislature or through the courts, examining the important issue of educ…
Getting a Poor Return
Many years ago Robert Dahl (1957) argued that the courts are rarely out of alignment with the dominant national political coalition and more recent scholarship has built on this argument. However, despite this, it is still a prevalent belief that courts protect the minority against the power of the majority. This article analyzes these views by examining the influence of the national coalition and courts on tax policy. The article shows that from…
Controlling Forum Choice and Controlling Policy
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to litigation and its influence on social and bureaucratic policy. One area of research has focused on interest group litigation. Another area of scholarship has shown that Congress encourages individual use of the courts to monitor and control bureaucratic behavior. In several areas of law, litigants have a choice of forum by deliberate legislative design, which is sometimes derided as “forum shoppi…
State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties
Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state suprem…
The Supreme Court and Opinion Content
The Supreme Court and Opinion Content
Many scholars of the Supreme Court and many justices assert the importance of the Federalist Papers. They provide important evidence of original meaning and interpretation of the Constitution, and there is evidence that there is an increase in citations to the Federalist Papers in Supreme Court opinions. While some may view this increased citation use as a positive development because it demonstrates reliance on legal authority in judicial decisi…
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
The power of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional remains as troubling today as when first introduced in Marbury v. Madison. While the normative arguments will perhaps always remain unsettled, the empirical question of when and how often justices actually use this power also continues unanswered. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over ten terms, we develop systematic tests of how requests for judicial review of state…
Framing Support for the Supreme Court in the Aftermath of Bush v. Gore
Public support for political actors and institutions depends on the frames emphasized in elite debate, especially following a political controversy. In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court made itself the object of political controversy because it effectively ended the 2000 presidential election. Opponents of the decision framed the Supreme Court ruling as partisan and "stealing the election," while supporters framed it as a principle…
Litigation, Courts, and Bureaucratic Policy
Many view courts as institutions that allow individual litigants to achieve equity, or fairness, when the litigant has a dispute with a branch of government. However, many also argue that this fairness comes at the expense of efficiency and democratic control, particularly when individuals sue government agencies. Perhaps no agency exemplifies the competing concerns of equity, efficiency, and policy controlas does the Internal Revenue Service (IR…
Regional Court Influence over Bureaucratic Policymaking
Regional Court Influence Over Bureaucratic Policymaking
While there have been numerous studies demonstrating bureaucratic control of administrative and regulatory agencies, many argue that the Internal Revenue Service is an agency out of control, and one not subject to political constraints. However, some recent studies have shown that the IRS is subject to some political control in shifting policy between the often competing concerns of efficiency and fairness. We extend these studies to examine judi…
With Friends Like These
Structure and process theorists (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast, among others), argue that the Administrative Procedures Act establishes a privileged position for the dominant organized interest of an industry in their dealings with regulatory agencies. We examined whether this was indeed the case with respect to the APA-required notice and comment period for rule making at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Based on an analysis of the …
An Original Look at Originalism
While the normative debate over originalism continues unabated (e.g., Scalia 1997; Whittington 1999), the systematic empirical validity of originalism lies relatively unexamined. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over eight years, we developed an initial systematic test of the influence of arguments about text and intent on the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Typically, we find that Justices support textual or intentiona…
Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments
One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahl's (1957) hypothesis that justices actually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion o…
Pre-Trial Bargaining and Litigation
The formal literature on pre-trial bargaining offers considerable insight on how different bargaining procedures asymmetric information affect efficiency. Less attention has been paid to fairness, despite the fact that fairness is an essential component of any system of justice. We address this state of affairs by analyzing the equilibria of a pre-trial bargaining model for both fairness and efficiency. This analysis involves ascertaining whether…
Framing Support for the Supreme Court in the Aftermath of Bush v. Gore
Public support for political actors and institutions depends on the frames emphasized in elite debate, especially following a political controversy. In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court made itself the object of political controversy because it effectively ended the 2000 presidential election. Opponents of the decision framed the Supreme Court ruling as partisan and "stealing the election," while supporters framed it as a principle…
Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments
One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahl's (1957) hypothesis that justices actually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion o…
With Friends Like These
Structure and process theorists (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast, among others), argue that the Administrative Procedures Act establishes a privileged position for the dominant organized interest of an industry in their dealings with regulatory agencies. We examined whether this was indeed the case with respect to the APA-required notice and comment period for rule making at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Based on an analysis of the …
The Supreme Court and Opinion Content
Many scholars of the Supreme Court and many justices assert the importance of the Federalist Papers. They provide important evidence of original meaning and interpretation of the Constitution, and there is evidence that there is an increase in citations to the Federalist Papers in Supreme Court opinions. While some may view this increased citation use as a positive development because it demonstrates reliance on legal authority in judicial decisi…
An Original Look at Originalism
While the normative debate over originalism continues unabated (e.g., Scalia 1997; Whittington 1999), the systematic empirical validity of originalism lies relatively unexamined. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over eight years, we developed an initial systematic test of the influence of arguments about text and intent on the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Typically, we find that Justices support textual or intentiona…
Regional Court Influence Over Bureaucratic Policymaking
While there have been numerous studies demonstrating bureaucratic control of administrative and regulatory agencies, many argue that the Internal Revenue Service is an agency out of control, and one not subject to political constraints. However, some recent studies have shown that the IRS is subject to some political control in shifting policy between the often competing concerns of efficiency and fairness. We extend these studies to examine judi…
The Labor of Judging
There has been significant scholarly research on judicial decision making and bureaucratic control but little research on bureaucrats who perform a judicial function, namely, administrative law judges. In this article, we analyze the influences on the decisions of administrative law judges (ALJs) from 1991 to 2006. Using ordered logit, we examine the influence of policy preference and hierarchical and political constraint. We find that ALJs are c…
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
The power of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional remains as troubling today as when first introduced in Marbury v. Madison. While the normative arguments will perhaps always remain unsettled, the empirical question of when and how often justices actually use this power also continues unanswered. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over ten terms, we develop systematic tests of how requests for judicial review of state…
Pre-Trial Bargaining and Litigation
The formal literature on pre-trial bargaining offers considerable insight on how different bargaining procedures asymmetric information affect efficiency. Less attention has been paid to fairness, despite the fact that fairness is an essential component of any system of justice. We address this state of affairs by analyzing the equilibria of a pre-trial bargaining model for both fairness and efficiency. This analysis involves ascertaining whether…
Ignoring Advice and Consent? The Uses of Judicial Recess Appointments
The authors seek to answer the questions of why presidents use the power to temporarily seat federal court judges during recesses of the Senate. The use of the recess power can upset the carefully calculated separation of powers envisioned by the framers, shifting power away from one branch of government toward another. Examining every judicial recess appointment from 1789 to 2004, the authors discover that presidents are conditionally strategic …
State Policy Innovation in Perspective
Why and when courts will change policy has been the subject of significant scholarly attention, but there has been little effort to integrate this research within the existing research of determinants of state legislative policy change. In this article, the authors incorporate both of these research areas to answer the question of whether policy change will occur through the legislature or through the courts, examining the important issue of educ…
Controlling Forum Choice and Controlling Policy
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to litigation and its influence on social and bureaucratic policy. One area of research has focused on interest group litigation. Another area of scholarship has shown that Congress encourages individual use of the courts to monitor and control bureaucratic behavior. In several areas of law, litigants have a choice of forum by deliberate legislative design, which is sometimes derided as “forum shoppi…
Leaders and Followers
Much of the state court literature assumes that decisions reached by state courts of last resort are independent of other state courts of last resort. Each state court has its own ideology as well as a particular set of institutional constraints and confronts different governors, publics, and state legislatures in rendering decisions. Scholarly research and its assumption of the independence of state‐level judicial decision making and policy impa…
Judicial Independence
In this article, we directly test the presence of judicial independence by examining judicial recess appointees who have later been confirmed by the Senate to full‐time Article III judicial positions. Specifically, we compare the votes of recess‐appointed courts of appeals judges during their temporary appointment tenure with a similar period following Senate confirmation. We find substantial differences in pre‐ and postconfirmation voting, sugge…
Getting a Poor Return
Many years ago Robert Dahl (1957) argued that the courts are rarely out of alignment with the dominant national political coalition and more recent scholarship has built on this argument. However, despite this, it is still a prevalent belief that courts protect the minority against the power of the majority. This article analyzes these views by examining the influence of the national coalition and courts on tax policy. The article shows that from…
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
Litigation, Courts, and Bureaucratic Policy
Many view courts as institutions that allow individual litigants to achieve equity, or fairness, when the litigant has a dispute with a branch of government. However, many also argue that this fairness comes at the expense of efficiency and democratic control, particularly when individuals sue government agencies. Perhaps no agency exemplifies the competing concerns of equity, efficiency, and policy controlas does the Internal Revenue Service (IR…
Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments
One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahl's (1957) hypothesis that justices actually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion o…
Pre-Trial Bargaining and Litigation
The formal literature on pre-trial bargaining offers considerable insight on how different bargaining procedures asymmetric information affect efficiency. Less attention has been paid to fairness, despite the fact that fairness is an essential component of any system of justice. We address this state of affairs by analyzing the equilibria of a pre-trial bargaining model for both fairness and efficiency. This analysis involves ascertaining whether…
Litigation, Courts, and Bureaucratic Policy
Many view courts as institutions that allow individual litigants to achieve equity, or fairness, when the litigant has a dispute with a branch of government. However, many also argue that this fairness comes at the expense of efficiency and democratic control, particularly when individuals sue government agencies. Perhaps no agency exemplifies the competing concerns of equity, efficiency, and policy controlas does the Internal Revenue Service (IR…
Regional Court Influence over Bureaucratic Policymaking
Regional Court Influence Over Bureaucratic Policymaking
While there have been numerous studies demonstrating bureaucratic control of administrative and regulatory agencies, many argue that the Internal Revenue Service is an agency out of control, and one not subject to political constraints. However, some recent studies have shown that the IRS is subject to some political control in shifting policy between the often competing concerns of efficiency and fairness. We extend these studies to examine judi…
With Friends Like These
Structure and process theorists (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast, among others), argue that the Administrative Procedures Act establishes a privileged position for the dominant organized interest of an industry in their dealings with regulatory agencies. We examined whether this was indeed the case with respect to the APA-required notice and comment period for rule making at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Based on an analysis of the …
An Original Look at Originalism
While the normative debate over originalism continues unabated (e.g., Scalia 1997; Whittington 1999), the systematic empirical validity of originalism lies relatively unexamined. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over eight years, we developed an initial systematic test of the influence of arguments about text and intent on the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Typically, we find that Justices support textual or intentiona…
Framing Support for the Supreme Court in the Aftermath of Bush v. Gore
Public support for political actors and institutions depends on the frames emphasized in elite debate, especially following a political controversy. In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court made itself the object of political controversy because it effectively ended the 2000 presidential election. Opponents of the decision framed the Supreme Court ruling as partisan and "stealing the election," while supporters framed it as a principle…
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
A Preference for Deference? The Supreme Court and Judicial Review
The power of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional remains as troubling today as when first introduced in Marbury v. Madison. While the normative arguments will perhaps always remain unsettled, the empirical question of when and how often justices actually use this power also continues unanswered. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over ten terms, we develop systematic tests of how requests for judicial review of state…
The Supreme Court and Opinion Content
The Supreme Court and Opinion Content
Many scholars of the Supreme Court and many justices assert the importance of the Federalist Papers. They provide important evidence of original meaning and interpretation of the Constitution, and there is evidence that there is an increase in citations to the Federalist Papers in Supreme Court opinions. While some may view this increased citation use as a positive development because it demonstrates reliance on legal authority in judicial decisi…
State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties
Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state suprem…
Controlling Forum Choice and Controlling Policy
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to litigation and its influence on social and bureaucratic policy. One area of research has focused on interest group litigation. Another area of scholarship has shown that Congress encourages individual use of the courts to monitor and control bureaucratic behavior. In several areas of law, litigants have a choice of forum by deliberate legislative design, which is sometimes derided as “forum shoppi…
State Policy Innovation in Perspective
Why and when courts will change policy has been the subject of significant scholarly attention, but there has been little effort to integrate this research within the existing research of determinants of state legislative policy change. In this article, the authors incorporate both of these research areas to answer the question of whether policy change will occur through the legislature or through the courts, examining the important issue of educ…
Getting a Poor Return
Many years ago Robert Dahl (1957) argued that the courts are rarely out of alignment with the dominant national political coalition and more recent scholarship has built on this argument. However, despite this, it is still a prevalent belief that courts protect the minority against the power of the majority. This article analyzes these views by examining the influence of the national coalition and courts on tax policy. The article shows that from…
Ignoring Advice and Consent? The Uses of Judicial Recess Appointments
The authors seek to answer the questions of why presidents use the power to temporarily seat federal court judges during recesses of the Senate. The use of the recess power can upset the carefully calculated separation of powers envisioned by the framers, shifting power away from one branch of government toward another. Examining every judicial recess appointment from 1789 to 2004, the authors discover that presidents are conditionally strategic …
The Labor of Judging
There has been significant scholarly research on judicial decision making and bureaucratic control but little research on bureaucrats who perform a judicial function, namely, administrative law judges. In this article, we analyze the influences on the decisions of administrative law judges (ALJs) from 1991 to 2006. Using ordered logit, we examine the influence of policy preference and hierarchical and political constraint. We find that ALJs are c…
Judicial Independence
In this article, we directly test the presence of judicial independence by examining judicial recess appointees who have later been confirmed by the Senate to full‐time Article III judicial positions. Specifically, we compare the votes of recess‐appointed courts of appeals judges during their temporary appointment tenure with a similar period following Senate confirmation. We find substantial differences in pre‐ and postconfirmation voting, sugge…
Leaders and Followers
Much of the state court literature assumes that decisions reached by state courts of last resort are independent of other state courts of last resort. Each state court has its own ideology as well as a particular set of institutional constraints and confronts different governors, publics, and state legislatures in rendering decisions. Scholarly research and its assumption of the independence of state‐level judicial decision making and policy impa…
Judging Inequality
Journal Article Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis by James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson Get access James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2021. 356 pp. $35.00. Robert M Howard Robert M Howard Georgia State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad063, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad063 Published: 2…
Political science (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (17 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (17 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law and economics (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (10 works) · Public Administration (9 works)