PSC 305: Judicial Politics

Term Paper Instructions

For this paper, you will write a paper comparing and contrasting the decision making, judicial
philosophy, their relations with other Justices, and cases authored of two members of the U.S.
Supreme Court, one of which must have been one of the primary Justices from The Brethren, and
the other being a member of the Court covered in The Nine. For this paper, you will want to
bring in material from the three books assigned in class, but also you will do some outside
research about the Justices that you choose, including discussion from at least one of each of the
justices’ cases in which they authored a majority, concurring, or dissenting opinion.
This paper should be a minimum of 6 pages, double spaced (do NOT add an additional space
between paragraphs to make it look longer- I will notice) with standard margins and 12-point
font size. The cover page does not count, nor does adding your name and other headings at the
beginning to make it look longer than it is. The six pages start when your first paragraph starts. I
will factor these things in if students do these things to try to make their paper look longer than it
really is. Papers that are not the minimum will see their grade deducted. The works cited page
also does NOT count towards the page minimum.
You may use any recognized academic citation method. However, you must have a separate
works cited page (this does not count towards the page limits). Papers should be properly
proofread, and those with bad grammar (including those that do not use proper nouns correctly,
will be penalized). Please see the grammar notes that are posted on UB Learns for more grammar
information Papers should view the minimum page requirement as more of a hard and fast rule
that students that may be more verbose that may exceed the limit. Papers that do not reach six
papers will have points deducted, and remember that tricks like adding spaces between
paragraphs and such will be noticed and I will cut them out to see what the true length of the
paper really is.
Also, keep in mind rules against plagiarism and their possible penalties, as they are severe.
Please submit your paper ONLY as a word file or PDF. Other files will not be read by the
system, and students risk their papers not being graded if they load other file types, so please do
NOT upload “pages”, “zip”, or any other types of files other than those listed.
As is indicated in the syllabus, students MUST turn in the course paper to pass the course. To put
this in other words, even if a student has a grade to earn for example a C-, but fail to turn in the
paper, that student will receive a grade of either “F” or an incomplete grade. There are
consequences to receiving a grade of incomplete in the future that you do not want to suffer, so
turn in something, even if it may be of the best quality.
As far as sources, you should have cited at least the following:
1) Each of the three books assigned from the course;
2) At least one case from each Justice you chose (this cannot be the same case for both
Justices, but you can choose cases that are on the same issue) at minimum at least one
case from each Justice should be from The Brethren and The Nine;
3) At least three other sources outside those in items #1 and #2.
To make things easier, I have attached a list of the justices that you may choose from each of the
books. You may NOT choose the same justice for each book.
I encourage students to not wait until the last second to work on this and please email me or visit
my office hours with any questions.
This paper is worth 25% of your course grade.
This will be due on UB Learns by the end of the day on May 11.
List of Justices for Each Book
Remember, you cannot pick the same
Justice for your two Justices. It has to be a
different Justice from each list.

If you choose a member of the Court that

appears in both lists, please only focus on
the materials for the book you are choosing
them from.

The Nine
The Brethren
Blackmun
Black Breyer
Blackmun Ginsburg
Brennan Kennedy
Burger O’Connor
Douglas Rehnquist (as Chief Justice only)
Harlan II Roberts
Marshall Scalia
Powell Souter
Rehnquist (as Associate Justice only) Stevens
Stewart Thomas
White