IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v44y2014i3p451-474..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

State Litigation during the Obama Administration: Diverging Agendas in an Era of Polarized Politics

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Nolette

Abstract

Throughout the Obama Administration, state attorneys general (AGs) have collaborated on several high-profile political issues. To get a fuller picture of this contemporary AG activism, this article analyzes AG participation in lawsuits and amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court across three presidential administrations. The results suggest that AGs’ agendas have increasingly diverged throughout the Obama Administration, reflecting greater vertical conflict between AGs and the federal government as well as horizontal conflict among AGs themselves. Several factors have contributed to this development, including the broader polarization of American politics, intensified activism among Republican AGs, and increased collaborations between AGs and ideological interest groups. Much as with partisan contestation in other venues, these AG conflicts show few signs of abating.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Nolette, 2014. "State Litigation during the Obama Administration: Diverging Agendas in an Era of Polarized Politics," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 44(3), pages 451-474.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:44:y:2014:i:3:p:451-474.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pju023
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paul Nolette, 2017. "The Dual Role of State Attorneys General in American Federalism: Conflict and Cooperation in an Era of Partisan Polarization," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 47(3), pages 342-377.
    2. Taedong Lee & Chris Koski, 2015. "Multilevel governance and urban climate change mitigation," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 33(6), pages 1501-1517, December.
    3. Raghunandan, Aneesh, 2024. "Government subsidies and corporate misconduct," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 122855, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Elysa M Dishman, 2023. "West Virginia v. EPA: Major Questions for the Future of the Administrative State and American Federalism," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 53(3), pages 435-461.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:44:y:2014:i:3:p:451-474.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.