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 supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search‐and‐seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.
In 2011, the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia contracted with the National Center for State Courts to conduct a comprehensive, statewide evaluation of adult drug courts. The results provide evidence of the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of Virginia's adult treatment drug courts. When compared to the business-as-usual alternative, drug courts saved taxpayers an average of $20,000 per participant. Further, programs employing Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) produced significantly lower probabilities of recidivism, and those that employed written sanction guidelines reported significantly higher odds of graduation for participants with no prior felonies than programs that did not.
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 in their use of the unilateral authority to appoint federal court judges during Senate recesses but that the use of this power is careful and spare, especially in the modern era.
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