Mccardle: An Analysis Of The Attitudinal Model

The Framers of the United States Constitution vested immense power in the judicial branch of the government. Over the years, the highest Court of the land, the United States Supreme Court, has ruled on a multitude of cases, making new laws and setting precedence. The American people deem the judicial body supreme and, perhaps irrationally, trust they will interpret the Constitution more accurately and ethically compared to the executive and legislative branches. However, decisions of the courts are not purely legal, but rather a synthesis of attitudinal, legal, and strategic processes. The attitudinal model proposes that a judge’s decision solely depends on her attitudes and policy preferences. The legal decision, on the other hand, asserts
The case involved a newspaper editor, William McCardle of Mississippi, who had been arrested by the Union Army based on the accusation of writing “inflammatory” articles about Reconstruction. McCardle filed for a writ of habeas corpus under the 1867 Act that “empowered federal courts to issue the writ in all cases where any person may be restrained of his or her liberty in violation of the Constitution, or of any treaty or law of the United States.” However, on February 17 1866, two weeks before the oral argument for the case, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois proposed the Repealer Act. The Act would essentially take the Court’s jurisdiction of such cases away. Although the bill did not pass until 1868, the Supreme Court decided to delay the hearing until Congress had either passed or discarded the bill. The Court ultimately unanimously denied jurisdiction and thereby closed the case. While judicial decisions result from the synthesis of the three aforementioned models, the judicial resolution to deny jurisdiction in Ex Parte McCardle was a predominantly legal
The Court applied the time’s case law and maintained consistency with past judicial practices. The judicial body in their precedential role to make laws is then bound to follow those laws. Normatively, if Congress were debating the passage of a law that would affect the result of a case, the Court would delay judgment. If passed, the Court ruled based on the new law, rather than making a decision before the passage of the law, leaving the outcome vulnerable for overruling and reversal. This legal and practical decision of the court would have been strategic had the courts made a decision anyway, but they did not. They followed the rules of the land, the Constitution, and precedence set by former Court