| The purpose of this study is to discern, in the words of Benjamin Cardozo, the “[s]treams of tendency” of the current judges of his former court in New York, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest tribunal. By examining the judges' voting and opinions in divided cases—the cases that provide a window into a court's “inner sanctum,” as Herman Pritchett put it—the aim is to uncover common threads, patterns, ideological or jurisprudential values, leanings, and outlooks that the individual judges bring to decision-making.; Like Herman Pritchett's THE ROOSEVELT C OURT, this study looks to divided cases as a reliable source for clues about the judges' “different assumptions,” “inarticulate major premises,” and “value systems.” Like Henry Abraham's FREEDOM AND THE COURT, this study examines the opinions in those cases to understand where and why the judges have drawn their respective “line[s] between individual rights and the rights of the community.” As in David O'Brien's STORM CENTER, this study takes a critical eye to the opinions as evidence, along with the voting records, of the “direction of judicial policy making.” Finally, like Stephen Gottlieb's critique of the Rehnquist court in MORALITY IMPOSED, this study treats “the patterns of the [judge's] conclusions [as] at least as important as the[ir] explanations.”; There is no comparable study of the Court of Appeals. In fact, with a few exceptions, this tribunal has not been subject to the scrutiny regularly applied to the Supreme Court and its justices. Previous studies authored or supervised by this writer were narrower in time and scope. Works by others focused on specific phenomena or on a particular area of the law.; This study, seeking to identify ideological and jurisprudential patterns, entailed a review of the nearly 400 divided public law cases from 1987 through 2001. The votes, the decisions, and the opposing separate opinions revealed common denominators for each of the court's judges and sharp contrasts among them. |
