Evaluating Congressional Constitutional Interpretation: Some Criteria and Two Informal Case Studies

Syftet med mitt examensarbete är att undersöka hur lärare upplever att arbetar med en metod som riktar sig till elever som har läs- och skrivsvårigheter. Mina frågeställningar berör hur lärare upplever att det är att arbeta med Wittingmetodens ominlärning samt hur de upplever att elevernas syn på sig själva som läsare och skrivare påverkas och slutligen hur de upplever att eleverna påverkas av metoden.   De teoretiska perspektiv som är utgångspunkterna i arbetet är dels specialpedagogiskt perspektiv som berör hur skolan ser på elevers svårigheter samt vilka åtgärder som lämpar sig och dels ett strukturellt perspektiv gällande vad som är goda arbets- och lärmiljöer för elever som har svårigheter med läsning och skrivning. Jag har varit inspirerad av fenomenografisk ansats och den metod jag har valt att använda mig av är kvalitativa halvstrukturerade intervjuer med lärare som arbetat med Wittingmetoden för att hjälpa elever åtgärda sina läs- och skrivsvårigheter. Intervjuerna har sedan analyserats med hjälp av en kvalitativ innehållsanalys som har resulterat i teman.   Resultatet visar att lärarna har en positiv inställning till Wittingmetodens ominlärning och att eleverna utvecklar en medvetenhet om sina styrkor och svagheter, får en starkare tilltro till sin egen förmåga och därmed även ett ökat självförtroende

Thinking About the Constitution at the Cusp

What do I mean in saying that we need to think about the Constitution at the cusp? I have in mind an image in which we have one way of thinking about the Constitution on one side of a line, and another way of thinking about the Constitution on the other. My sense is that we may have crossed such a line quite recently. I believe that we may be in a new constitutional order, different from the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order that existed from 1937 to sometime in the 1980s. If so, those of us who have been teaching constitutional law for a long time may find ourselves in the position of law professors in 1938 and 1939, whose way of thinking about the Constitution was developed in the 1920s: we are intimately familiar with a whole raft of cases that simply do not have much to do with the Constitution in this new constitutional order. A law professor who said in 1940 that the farm program at issue in Wickard v. Filburn would be unconstitutional under the standards the Court used in the 1920s might have been right, but his statement would also have been profoundly irrelevant. I sometimes have the same feeling about critical comments about the Supreme Court\u27s recent work: the criticisms are that the Court\u27s current actions are not what the Court would have done ten years ago, and that the Court\u27s actions are inconsistent with the way most law professors have come to understand the Constitution. This criticism may be true enough, but it is perhaps profoundly irrelevant

Alarmism Versus Moderation in Responding to the Rehnquist Court

I begin in Part I by offering a description of the Supreme Court\u27s recent decisions as a less substantial repudiation of prior principles than many think them to be, and as leaving Congress with the means to achieve a quite substantial proportion of the policy goals it pursued in the statutes the Court invalidated. Part II explains why Congress is unlikely to do so, in light of our apparent commitment to divided government, and parties that are organized around distinctive ideologies because of divided government. Part III turns to the prospect for continued policy transformation, identifying the conditions under which either the political branches or the Supreme Court could pursue that transformation, and suggesting that those conditions are not highly likely to be realized. Part IV is a brief conclusion, examining the implications of my argument for advocacy and scholarship

Defending a Rule of Institutional Autonomy on No-Harm Grounds

The argument I sketch here for institutional autonomy is basically empirical and agrees with Professor Hamilton in making harm-reduction the overriding social goal. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I suggest that autonomous institutions may be able to socialize their adherents more effectively than institutions that lack autonomy and that - if the institutions\u27 values are compatible with the legislature\u27s - their more effective socialization can produce a net reduction in the harms inflicted by the institutions\u27 members. Second, autonomy for all institutions can be defended if the gains from assuring autonomy for groups whose values are compatible with the legislature\u27s values exceed the losses from doing so for groups with values the legislature rejects

Referring to Foreign Law in Constitutional Interpretation: An Episode in the Culture Wars

As Judge Messitte\u27s essay demonstrates, recent references in Supreme Court decisions to non-U.S. legal materials have generated a great deal of controversy. Those who make such references say that doing so is no big deal. I have called the controversy a tempest in a teapot. My topic here is the disjuncture between the perception on one side that something important and troubling has happened - or, as I will argue, may be about to happen - and the perception on the other that there is nothing to be concerned about. After describing in Section I the practice that has given rise to the controversy, I examine in Section II one feature of the controversy that, I believe, has not yet been addressed in detail: The target of criticism is not really what Justices of the Supreme Court have done, but rather what they might do. I then argue that the fact that the target is an imagined practice rather than the real one is a clue to the nature of the controversy. The controversy, I conclude in Section III, is a skirmish in the ongoing culture wars over the courts. The claims made against and for references to non-U.S. law in constitutional interpretation ought to be analyzed as cultural artifacts rather than as arguments, that is, in terms of the reasons given against and for the practice

New Forms of Judicial Review and the Persistence of Rights - And Democracy-Based Worries

Recent developments in judicial review have raised the possibility that the debate over judicial supremacy versus legislative supremacy might be transformed into one about differing institutions to implement judicial review. Rather than posing judicial review against legislative supremacy, the terms of the debate might be over having institutions designed to exercise forms of judicial review that accommodate both legislative supremacy and judicial implementation of constitutional limits. After examining some of these institutional developments in Canada, South Africa, and Great Britain, this Article asks whether these accommodations, which attempt to pursue a middle course, have characteristic instabilities that will in the long run lead constitutional systems back to wither judicial or legislative supremacy

Some Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education

The litigation campaign against segregation that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education\u27 remains an important subject of study. Brown continues to be controversial because Americans remain uncertain about what its substantive commitments were, and, perhaps more important, how those commitments, as we now understand them, fit together with the other values and institutions that provide the structure of contemporary politics. This Essay will follow up on three aspects of the litigation campaign preceding Brown in an effort to show how Brown and its legacy illuminate enduring features of the organization of the U.S. political system

The Canon(s) of Constitutional Law: An Introduction

Any discipline has a canon, a set of themes that organize the way in which people think about the discipline. Or, perhaps, any discipline has a number of competing canons. Is there a canon of constitutional law? A group of casebook authors met in December 1999 to discuss the choices they had made - what they had decided to include, what to exclude, what they regretted excluding (or including), what principles they used in developing their casebooks. Most of the authors were affiliated with law schools, but some had developed coursebooks for use in undergraduate political science and constitutional history courses. Each participant was asked to write a short paper describing the canon of constitutional law, either as reflected in his or her choices, or in the range of materials available in the field. What do coursebook authors\u27 reflections on their choices show about the canon(s) of constitutional law? In my view, three themes pervaded our discussions, and many of the papers that follow. A crude classification is that one theme involves the focus of the constitutional law canon, another involves the canon\u27s substance, and the third involves the audience for constitutional law studies