Search

I argue the Supreme Court learns to craft legal rules by relying on the Courts of Appeals as laboratories of law, observing their decisions and reviewing those that best inform legal development. I develop a model that shows how the Supreme Court leverages multiple Courts of Appeals decisions to identify which will be most informative to review, and what decision to make upon review. Because an unbiased judge only makes an extreme decision when there is an imbalance in the parties’ evidence, the Supreme Court is able to draw inferences from cases it chooses not to review. The results shed light on how hierarchy eases the inherent difficulty and uncertainty of crafting law and on how the Supreme Court learns to create doctrine.

We propose a dynamic model of precedent in a judicial hierarchy which incorporates a “bottom-up” informational component. When a high court establishes precedents, it has uncertainty regarding how they will play out when applied to future legal disputes. Lower court implementation of these precedents can inform the high court about the contemporary policy implications—i.e., the ideological location—of the precedents. If lower court usage of a precedent is informative, the high court will consider the revealed location of the precedent when contemplating reducing the precedent’s authority and applicability to future cases. Using data on U.S. Supreme Court precedents and U.S. Courts of Appeals citations to these precedents, we estimate a model of the Court’s negative treatment of precedent. We find lower court usage of precedent can provide new, useful information on the policy content of a precedent, helping the Court shape law in a way consistent with its preferences.

Elected officials have difficulty controlling politically insulated institutions, leaving the appointment process as perhaps their most effective means of influence. Yet, history shows that actors on these institutions—especially the Supreme Court—often behave unpredictably. Our goal is to determine whether variation in two components of cognitive style, prior to a justice’s nomination to the Court, predicts ideological drift once on the Court. Using linguistic software created by cognitive psychologists, we examined over 1000 speeches, articles, and separate opinions written by Supreme Court justices before they were nominated to the Court. Our results show that justices whose prenomination words revealed cognitive inconsistency drift more than those with stable world views.

Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of courts will be a function of public confidence in the legislature as well as evaluations of the judiciary. We test this theory, finding that public confidence in both Congress and the Court significantly affect congressional support for the Supreme Court, controlling for the ideological distance between the Court and Congress as well as the Court’s workload. The results offer a more refined and complex view of the role of public sentiment in balancing institutional power in American politics.

Existing work on the U.S. separation of powers typically views the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional and statutory disputes. By contrast, much comparative work on institutional politics explicitly recognizes the role of executives in enforcing and implementing court decisions. Drawing on that work, this study relaxes the assumption that executives must comply with Supreme Court rulings, and instead allows the propensity for executive compliance to depend upon indirect enforcement by the public. We develop and analyze a simple spatial model of Supreme Court decision making in the presence of executive discretion over compliance with the Court's rulings, and demonstrate that such discretion can act to restrict substantially the Court's decision making. Relying upon data collected for the Warren and Burger courts, we find empirical evidence consistent with the argument that the Supreme Court's ability to constrain executive discretion depends critically upon the public being aware of and understanding the ramifications of the case at hand.

Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court���s ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court���s ideological output���whether the Court���s decision is liberal or conservative���suffers from systematic bias. We trace this bias empirically and explain the undesirable consequences it has for empirical analyses of judicial behavior. Specifically, we show that, although the Court���s preferences are positively correlated with the ideological direction of the justices��� decision to reverse a lower court, the attitudes of the justices are negatively related���and significantly so���to the ideological direction of outcomes that affirm lower court decisions. We also offer a solution that allows scholars to work around this ������affirmance bias.������

While past research has demonstrated widespread compliance in the Courts of Appeals with Supreme Court precedent (e.g., Gruhl 1980; Songer 1987; Songer, Segal, and Cameron 1994; Songer and Sheehan 1990), compliance is not automatic and is surely political. We examine compliance with Supreme Court overrulings of precedent-cases in which we might expect the lowest levels of compliance with Supreme Court policy prescriptions. We argue that several variables are relevant to the compliance decision and that those variables fall into two broad categories: characteristics of the Supreme Court precedent and characteristics of the circuit applying the precedent. In our event history analysis, we find that both precedent and circuit characteristics determine whether, and how quickly, a circuit follows a Supreme Court decision that overrules existing precedent; that is, unanimity, complexity, and the age of the overruled precedent, as well as the likelihood of Supreme Court review, are related to the compliance deci...

The decision to overrule U.S. Supreme Court precedent, we argue, results from the justices' pursuit of their policy preferences within intra- and extra-Court constraints. Based on a duration analysis of cases decided from the 1946 through 1995 terms, we show that ideological incongruence between a precedent and a subsequent Court increases the chance of it being overruled. Two legal norms also exert substantive effects as the Court is less likely to overrule statutory precedents and more likely to overrule precedents that previously have been interpreted negatively by the Court. While certain precedent characteristics also influence this decision, the political environment exerts no such effect. Consequently, one of the principal implications of this research is that legal norms influence Supreme Court decision making.

This article contemplates the role the U.S. Supreme Court has played in the maintenance of the American two-party system. Specifically, we ask whether the Court has worked to constrain minor parties or to facilitate their efforts to become meaningful political entities. Our examination of litigation involving political parties depicts a Court that has remained "neutral" toward minor and major parties; indeed, we found some evidence of a positive relationship between minor parties and Court decisions, but only after we controlled for three other variables: cycles of American politics, case issues, and Court eras. These and other findings lead us to a number of conclusions about the role the Court plays in the American political system.

The early 1940s marked a period in which the consensus norms of the Supreme Court experienced a radical and apparently permanent change. The consistent pattern of relatively high cohesion characteristic of the Court's earlier years gave way to surging rates of concurring and dissenting opinions. The present research is an examination of the factors possibly contributing to the justices' sharply increasing tendency to express their individual views rather than to defer to the opinion of the Court. Using both historical and quantitative methods, the authors evaluate the impact of the Court's discretionary jurisdiction, changing caseload, associate justice characteristics, and judicial leadership. The evidence presented points to the conclusion that in combination with other factors the leadership style introduced by Harlan Fiske Stone in 1941 had a dramatic effect on the consensus norms of the Court.

Previous impact research has primarily investigated controversial civil liberties decisions. The present study examines the response of the United States Courts of Appeals to changes in the labor and antitrust policies announced by the Supreme Court between 1950 and 1977. Significant impact was discovered. In each policy area, the decisional trends of the courts of appeals underwent a significant change after each of two policy shifts on the Supreme Court. Changes in the decisional trends of the courts of appeal were in the predicted direction even after controls were introduced for judges' party and holdover effects

This paper presents preliminary findings from a study designed to fill a gap in political scientists' knowledge about the extent to which the Supreme Court grants or denies plenary review when conflict with one or more of its precedents is claimed. The findings are that the presence of conflict promoted the granting of review between 1961 and 1976, including the Warren Court terms (1961-68), even in the face of controls for litigant status, civil liberty issues, and constitutional issues, but that it was a poorer predictor during the Burger Court terms (1969-76).

The Supreme Court has become an instrument for the application of an inadequate secular religion-Liberal idealism-to the social problems confronting our society. That idealism expresses an ontological theory of the nature of reality as atomistic and therefore as inevitably disorderly, purposeless, and irrational. Liberalism by its nature drives us relentlessly toward social disintegration. Liberal ontology contradicts the historical experience of civilized man, which has been one of expanding the area of order, purpose, and rationality.' It also contradicts our national experience as understood under liberalism's own empirical theory of knowledge. The meaning of the American adventure and the role of the Supreme Court-our present situation and our future-can be understood only in terms of the conflict within liberalism, between its irrational ontology and its rational epistemology, and between its atomistic ontology and our older tradition of order.

In a recent Gallup poll the question was asked: "Some people say that the Supreme Court decides many questions largely on the basis of politics. Do you agree or disagree with this?" Among those who had an opinion on this matter, 54 per cent agreed and 46 per cent disagreed. It is impossible, of course, to know what Mr. Gallup meant by the term "politics", nor how it was interpreted by the persons polled. If it referred to divisions in terms of party alignments, then it is easy to demonstrate that there is no "politics" on the present Court. During the 1945-46 term the Court was composed of six Democrats and two Republicans,' and on only two of the 77 decisions in which there was division of opinion among the justices during the term did the two Republicans line up against the six Democrats. But if politics means the political philosophies of the justices and their personal judgments as to the role of law and the Constitution in relation to economic and social development, then it is clear that politics does, and should, influence Supreme Court decisions. President Theodore Roosevelt put the case very well when he wrote to Senator Lodge in 1902, in connection with the appointment of Judge Holmes to the Supreme Court

T HIS PAPER REPORTS AN ATTEMPT to examine by quantitative methods the validity of certain hypotheses about the behavior of the Supreme Court, and of its individual members, in federal administrative-agency cases during the 1947-1956 terms. The presentation is divided into four parts: (1) a brief attempt to clarify the basic similarities and differences between those who engage in the quantitative analysis of appellate-court behavior and those who do not; (2) the conceptual framework with which I approach the study of the Supreme Court and some of the hypotheses which stem from that framework; (3) the methods employed in collecting and analyzing the data necessary for testing the hypotheses formulated; and (4) the evidence developed for the acceptance or rejection of each of these hypotheses.