POL 335: American Supreme Court

Final Exam info

• The final exam is on Wednesday, 5/12, at 2:00 p.m.
• The exam is closed book, but you may bring one page (8 1/2 x 11) of notes into the exam room with you.
• The exam will consist of several multiple choice questions and at least one essay.
• The point of the exam is twofold: a) to give you a material incentive to digest the material, and b) to allow me to monitor your progress with the same.
• You should be prepared to answer questions on the broad themes of the course, illustrating your answers with sufficient detail to make your argument and show me that you have digested and appropriated the material.
• The broad themes of the course include:
• the Supreme Court as a policymaker
• the Court's relationships with other branches of government (both in terms of "strategy" and in terms of "dialogue," and including the ways that other branches of government may respond to the Court)
• the role of the executive branch, Congress, and state governments in the development of constitutional principles
• the concept of judicial strategy and the evidence for its existence
• the movement of constitutional approaches to abortion; the nature of judicial reasoning, particularly the concept of public justification and "harmonization" as presented by Carter and Burke
• the relationship between interest groups and the Court
• and the concept of "political jurisprudence" as a description of constraints on the Court's policymaking role