The Contract Clause And Supreme Court Decisionmaking: A Bicentennial Retrospective

Authors

  • Albert P. Melone

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.1988.9.0.41-63

Abstract

It is fitting that during the period of the bicentennial celebration of the U.S. Constitution public law scholars both reexamine constitutional history and engage in an introspective examination of the subfield within political science. There is dissatisfaction with the dominant approaches of political jurisprudence and judicial behavioralism (Stumpf 1983). Public choice theory, critical legal theory, and some normative models are vying for paradigmatic hegemony. Yet important figures of political jurisprudence and judicial behavioralism such as Pritchett, Murphy, Tanenhaus, Schubert, Schmidhauser, Nagel, Shapiro, and Ulmer, among others, have contributed greatly in explaining judicial decisionmaking in realistic political and human terms. It is a mistake to discard the advances of the last three or four decades in favor of approaches lacking explanatory power. Science, not rhetoric, must remain our epistemological foundation.

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Published

1989-01-01

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