The Solicitor General\u27s Changing Role in Supreme Court Litigation

Over the last two decades, as the Supreme Court has sharply cut back its case load, the Solicitor General has wielded the tremendous influence that comes with being the Court’s most frequent and successful litigant in new ways. In this Article, the authors examine both the causes and consequences of these changes, which have diminished the Solicitor General’s role at the certiorari stage and expanded it at the merits stage. They find that at the certiorari stage, when the Court is selecting its cases and setting its agenda, the Solicitor General is now seeking certiorari in so few cases—just fifteen per Term—that the Solicitor General is ceding the federal government’s once-substantial influence over the Court’s agenda-setting to more aggressive litigants. At the merits stage, in contrast, the Solicitor General is now participating in over three-quarters of the Court’s cases, and is doing so more frequently as amicus curiae than as a party. The authors address concerns that, with this nearly pervasive involvement, the Solicitor General may have become too intrusive in private litigation or too partisan in cases presenting high-profile, socially controversial issues. They find, however, that solicitors general have acted within their proper constitutional role, largely confining involvement as amicus to cases that directly and substantially affect the federal government’s institutional interests

Setting the Social Agenda: Deciding to Review High-Profile Cases at the Supreme Court

This is the published version

The Philosophy of Certiorari: Jurisprudential Considerations in Supreme Court Case Selection

In this Article, we offer a fuller jurisprudential analysis of the gatekeeping choices that the Justices make as they set the direction in which the Court will proceed. Using more recent data that we gathered from the docket books of Justices Brennan and Marshall, we show that rule-based and strategic factors, while undeniably important, cannot adequately account for the Justices’ voting behavior at the certiorari stage. Although the Justices consider the very same cases and materials, in light of the same criteria set out in the Court’s rule, they come to quite different conclusions about which cases merit plenary review. Even Justices closely aligned in decisions on the merits often have dramatically different voting records on certiorari. We suggest that other, more jurisprudential considerations also affect the individual Justices’ judgments about the quantity and content of the Court’s proper workload. In particular, we contend that a Justice’s views about what role the Supreme Court should play in the judicial system and American life—including his or her views on the nature of precedent, the importance of uniformity in federal law, and the Court’s appropriate role in effectuating social change—play a central role in shaping his or her decisions about case selection

Sex and Senesce: A Exploration of Aging Women’s Sexual Selves

The sexual lives of women over the age of 50 are often forgotten from just about every medium. This research hopes to uncover how aging women interpret their current sexual selves, sexual histories, and changing bodies. In thinking about this, four women were interviewed about their life stories surrounded love, passion, and sex. Each of these women told brave accounts of their lives and through their narratives, we were able to draw theoretical conclusions about bodily shame, age performativity, and prescribed stereotypical roles. These four stories, told individually as to support each woman\u27s personal narrative are vastly different yet intersect in many ways. The research concludes an important theoretical analysis of an aging woman\u27s connection to life and how both age and gender are situated in a faulty timeline. Their unforgettable stories explore what life looks like as the years slip away and show how the process of aging is a universal human struggle