Black Americans and the Burger Court: Implications for the Political System

In recent years there has been considerable commentary on the posture of the Burger Court toward black Americans and civil rights interests. During the Warren Court era, the Supreme Court was generally pictured as supporting these interests. Under Chief Justice Burger, however, this image of the Court seems to be fading; President Nixon’s 1968 campaign pledge to reverse the decisional tendencies of the Warren Court by appointing “strict constructionists” appears to be meeting with some success. After less than three years in office, the President had the rare opportunity to fill four vacancies on the nine-man Court, including the position of Chief Justice. The protracted confirmation battles that attended several of the President’s nominations, plus the decisions of the Nixon appointees once on the Court, demonstrate that some changes in the decisional output of the Court were anticipated and are indeed occurring. My purpose here is to examine these changes in the broader context of the role of the Supreme Court in the efforts of blacks to achieve objectives within the political system as it presently operates. Specifically, this Article will attempt to describe the posture of the Burger Court, as reflected in its decisions, relative to racial justice and the quality of life for black Americans, and to consider the implications of this posture in terms of the capability of the political system to deal with civil rights problems

Symposium: Courts, Judges, Politics—Some Political Science Perspectives

Unlike most symposia, this one is not restricted to a single topic. The common theme of this endeavor, and there is even an exception to this, is that the research and ideas presented are those of professionally trained political scientists. But the exception—a contribution by a recent law school graduate—underscores the basic purpose of this Symposium: to show the insights and values that can be gained by examining a variety of topics from social science perspectives

Freedoms, courts, politics: studies in civil liberties

X+324hlm.;23c

Freedoms, courts, politics, studies in civil liberties

x, 324 p.; 23 cm

Offshore Oil Politics: A Study in Public Policy Making

258 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1954.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

River terrace sand and gravel deposit reserve estimation using three-dimensional electrical resistivity tomography for bedrock surface detection

We describe the application of 3D electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to the characterisation and reserve estimation of an economic fluvial sand and gravel deposit. Due to the smoothness constraints used to regularise the inversion, it can be difficult to accurately determine the geometry of sharp interfaces. We have therefore considered two approaches to interface detection that we have applied to the 3D ERT results in an attempt to provide an accurate and objective assessment of the bedrock surface elevation. The first is a gradient-based approach, in which the steepest gradient of the vertical resistivity profile is assumed to correspond to the elevation of the mineral/bedrock interface. The second method uses an intrusive sample point to identify the interface resistivity at a location within the model, from which an iso-resistivity surface is identified that is assumed to define the interface. Validation of these methods has been achieved through direct comparison with observed bedrock surface elevations that were measured using real-time-kinematic GPS subsequent to the 3D ERT survey when quarrying exposed the bedrock surface. The gradient-based edge detector severely underestimated the depth to bedrock in this case, whereas the interface resistivity method produced bedrock surface elevations that were in close agreement with the GPS-derived surface. The failure of the gradient-based method is attributed to insufficient model sensitivity in the region of the bedrock surface, whereas the success of the interface resistivity method is a consequence of the homogeneity of the mineral and bedrock, resulting in a consistent interface resistivity. These results highlight the need for some intrusive data for model validation and for edge detection approaches to be chosen on the basis of local geological conditions