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The Rhode Island Supreme Court: A Well-Integrated Political System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Edward N. Beiser
Edward N. Beiser*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

Richard Fenno (1962: 315) has suggested that: “[I] f one considers the main activity of a political system to be decision making, the acid test of its internal integration is its capacity to make collective decisions without flying apart in the process.” In the context of the Congress, Fenno (1962: 310) defined committee integration as: “the degree to which there is a working together or a meshing together or mutual support among its roles and subgroups. Conversely, it is also defined as the degree to which a committee is able to minimize conflict among its roles and its subgroups, by heading off or resolving the conflicts that arise. A concomitant of integration is the existence of a fairly consistent set of norms, widely agreed upon and widely followed by the members.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Winter 1974 , pp. 167 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wish to express my deep appreciation to the members of the Rhode Island Supreme Court: Chief Justice Thomas Roberts, and Associate Justices Thomas Paolino, William Powers (since retired), Alfred Joslin and Thomas Kelleher. This study could not have been conducted without their active and generous co-operation. The Justices were promised anonymity and that promise has been respected throughout this article. Quotations for which sources are not provided may be taken to be the language of an individual Rhode Island Justice, as best as I was able to reproduce it. I have allowed myself the luxury of minor editorial license inside quotation marks only insofar as was necessary to produce grammatical sentences.

References

Cases

Becker v. Beaudoin, 261 A.2d 896 (R.I. 1970).Google Scholar
Brown v. Board of Educ, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Plessey v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904).Google Scholar

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