For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in 2003 or 2004 in the field of public law.

Award Committee:  Susan E. Lawrence, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, chair; Charles R. Epp,  University of Kansas; Terri Peretti, Santa Clara University.

Recipient:  Lori Ann Johnson, Mercer University

Dissertation:  "Who Governs the Guardians?  The Politics of Policymaking for Federal Courts."

Dissertation Chair:  Robert A. Kagan, University of California, Berkeley

Recipient: Martin J. Sweet, Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation:  "Supreme Policy-Making: Coping with the Supreme Court's Affirmative Action Policies"

Dissertation Chair:  Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin, Madison

(Johnson)
Citation:  Lori Ann Johnson's dissertation is an original and creative examination of the politics of competition between the judicial branch and Congress in controlling federal court policy, a new and important topic for the field.  Johnson's exploration of the increasing institutionalization of the federal judicial branch over the course of the 20th century makes a significant contribution to the discipline and increases our understanding of shared power among separate branches with dramatically different views of the appropriate role and function of the federal courts.  Johnson focuses on judges as they engage in institutional maintenance rather than adjudication, adding a fresh perspective to our understanding of judicial behavior and pointing to instances in which institutional interests may influence jurisprudential decisions.

Johnson tracks the interaction and competition between Congress's political policy-making process and the judicial branch's administrative policy-making process through in-depth ethnographic and documentary case studies of the making of federal court rules of procedure, federal criminal sentencing reform, and federal versus state jurisdiction questions.  Her theory-generating research yields an argument that the degree of institutionalization of the judicial branch at the particular historical moment and the relative politicization of the particular policy question are the two primary factors that explain the shifting dominance of the legislative and judicial branches in setting policy for the operation of the federal courts. 

Johnson poses original theoretical questions and concepts, crafts an effective design for examining those questions, and reaches interesting and important conclusions.  By providing a distinct treatment of the federal judicial branch as an institution, Johnson opens the door to untrodden avenues of research on the complex interactions between institutional concerns and policy preferences in governmental decision making.  Johnson's dissertation makes a significant new contribution to our understanding of law and politics in the American political system. 

(Sweet)
Citation:  Martin J. Sweet's dissertation presents a creative, novel, and well-developed approach to the study of judicial impact, a long-standing concern of the discipline.  Sweet blends quantitative, qualitative, and analytical methods in his policy-based approach to judicial impact, assessing program implementation, goals, and effectiveness both before and after a Court decision.  Carefully integrating well-established "top-down" and "bottom-up" empirical approaches to judicial impact, Sweet views Court decisions as part of a broader policy-making process. Sweet uses an exploration of the responses of Philadelphia, Portland, and Miami to the U.S. Supreme Court's affirmative action decision in City of Richmond v. Crosen to develop a policy-based impact theory that highlights judicial signaling and legislative coping mechanisms.  Sweet argues that in applying strict scrutiny to Richmond's minority business enterprise affirmative action program, the Court sent both an anti-affirmative action outcome signal and a pro-affirmative action rule-based signal by declaring Richmond's program unconstitutional and providing a list of the conditions necessary to find a minority business enterprise program constitutional. This mix allowed the lower courts to follow Crosen's outcome signal by routinely striking down affirmative action minority business enterprise programs, while local legislative bodies clung to the rule-based pro-affirmative action signal and employed a variety of coping mechanisms to shield their programs from review by the federal courts. Sweet's analysis explains how and why affirmative action programs have grown in the face of consistent lower court compliance with the Supreme Court's decisions.  The policy preference divergence model Sweet develops presents a clear alternative to conventional compliance theory which posits that the legislative and judicial branches will achieve policy congruence through a repetitive cycle of legal challenges and legislative amendments.

Throughout, Sweet's dissertation is carefully developed and persuasively argued.  Sweet's deft combination of doctrinal, ethnographic, and statistical analysis stands as testament against methodological divides.  Sweet's theory of judicial impact provides a new and important corrective to our understanding of the role of the Court in American politics.