TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: SENATORS‘ OPENING STATEMENTS AT SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATON HEARINGS
This article examines the opening statements made by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Its aim is to identify the audiences senators target in their opening statements and to examine the messages they send to these audiences. The article shifts the focus away from the outcome of Supreme Court nominations to the “nomination discourse” of confirmation proceedings. Although senators use their opening statements to send a variety of messages to multiple audiences, they tend to emphasize the themes of judicial philosophy, the questioning of nominees, and the Senate's role in the confirmation process.
Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Justices: Partisan and Institutional Politics
A president's most important appointments are to the Supreme Court of the United States. Unlike cabinet officers, the Senate does not routinely confirm Supreme Court justices. To study this phenomenon, I propose four related models of confirmation. The models assume senators to be political persons motivated by both partisan and institutional concerns. The data consist of 138 confirmation decisions, with the parameters estimated by probit. The models explain between 38% and 42% of the variance in confirmation decisions, while predicting 87% and 88% of the cases correctly. Institutional politics are at least as important as partisan politics in predicting decisions.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.