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Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases
Author(s) -
Robinson Rob
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
policy studies journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.773
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1541-0072
pISSN - 0190-292X
DOI - 10.1111/psj.12075
Subject(s) - punctuated equilibrium , surprise , framing (construction) , punctuation , supreme court , scholarship , political science , law , legislation , law and economics , sociology , history , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , archaeology , communication , biology
For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the S upreme C ourt. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the C ourt's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying R eed v . R eed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use R eed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.