The United States Supreme Court's Volitional Agendas, 1801-1993: Historical Claims versus Empirical Findings (open access)

The United States Supreme Court's Volitional Agendas, 1801-1993: Historical Claims versus Empirical Findings

In this study, I examined the Supreme Court's agenda from 1801 to 1993 to determine the composition and dynamics of the issues that have dominated the business of the Court. Specifically, I set out to test empirically Robert G. McCloskey's (now standard) characterization of the Supreme Court's history, which sees it as dominated by nationalism/federalism issues before the Civil War, by economic issues just after the War through the 1930s, and by civil rights and liberties since the 1930s. The question that drove my investigation was "Is McCloskey's interpretation, which appears to be based on the great cases of Supreme Court history, an accurate description of the agenda represented in the Supreme Court's total body of reported decisions?" To test McCloskey's historical theses I employed concepts adapted from Richard Pacelle's (1991) important work on the agenda of post-Roosevelt Court and used the methods of classical historical analysis and of interrupted time-series analysis. Data for my research came from existing datasets and from my own collection (I coded the manifest content of thousands of Supreme Court's decisions from 1887 back to 1801). The most important finding from my analyses is that McCloskey not withstanding, the pre-Civil War Supreme Court's agenda was …
Date: May 2000
Creator: Ogundele, Ayodeji O.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Beggars, Brides, and Bards: The Political Philosophy of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (open access)

Beggars, Brides, and Bards: The Political Philosophy of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew

To do justice to Shakespeare’s comprehensive moral and political thought this paper seeks to discover what we can learn from the political philosophy of his largely neglected comedy, Taming of the Shrew. Not only does this endeavor provide a valuable forgotten link within the critical analyses of the theorists, but it also corrects the various misinterpretations of the play among contemporary critics. I argue that the play surveys various key themes that are rooted in classical political philosophy – such as education, the problems of anger, and the dynamic between nature and convention – and takes into consideration how they apply to modern man. Shakespeare borrows Plato’s idea that eroticism is central to education and explicitly references Ovid’s love books to reexamine our conceptions about one’s formation of character, the proper standards for judging the ideal mate, and the effects of these issues on the stability of the community. I also submit an innovative explanation of the relation between the induction and the main plot. Taken together they exhibit a critique of the role of the poet and his art in modern civil society.
Date: August 2011
Creator: Murphy, Stephanie Miranda
System: The UNT Digital Library
President Truman Versus the Eightieth Congress: A Study of the Special Session of 1948 (open access)

President Truman Versus the Eightieth Congress: A Study of the Special Session of 1948

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is the description and. analysis of President Harry S Truman's use of his Presidential prerogative in recalling the Republican Eightieth Congress into special session on July 26, 1948. The results of this investigation indicate that President Truman's call for a special session of the Eightieth Congress on July 26, 1948, was primarily a tactic in his campaign strategy for the election of that year. However, the full significance of the session can be understood only by taking into account the political environment of the postwar period and the executive-legislative relationships between President Truman and the Republican Eightieth Congress on domestic legislation. The special session was a microcosm of the political events of 1948 and the relationship between the President and the Eightieth Congress.
Date: December 1970
Creator: Muller, Arnold John
System: The UNT Digital Library