An Outside Educator Views Michigan\u27s Legal Education from the Inside

Harold J. Spaeth is a Michigan State University political science professor who has attracted considerable attention for his computer predictions of the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases. Over the past seven years, his predictions are said to have had an accuracy rate of more than 93 percent. Spaeth\u27s approach is to analyze the voting records of justices to determine personal attitudes and other factors influencing their decisions. He says these voting records are usually more revealing than legal theories which may mask the underlaying motivations in the particular judgment. A U-M law student since the summer of 1979, the 50-year-old professor says a law degree will assist my future writing and research, and better equip me to do consulting work for attorneys who try cases before the Supreme Court. In the summer of 1979, after 25 years behind a podium, I became a student at the Law School. Call it role reversal with a vengeance. Now, 14 months and 45 credits later, some observations on the producers, products, and processes of legal education at the University of Michiga

Standing the Test of Time: The Breadth of Majority Coalitions and the Fate of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents

Should a strategic Justice assemble a broader coalition for the majority opinion than is necessary, even if that means accommodating changes that move the opinion away from the author’s ideal holding? If the author’s objective is to durably move the law to his or her ideal holding, the conventional answer is no, because there is a cost and no corresponding benefit. We consider whether attracting a broad majority coalition can placate future courts. Controlling for the size of the coalition, we find that cases with ideologically narrow coalitions are more likely to be treated negatively by later courts. Specifically, adding either ideological breadth or a new member to the majority coalition results in an opinion that is less likely to be overruled, criticized, or questioned by a later court. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom regarding the coalition-building strategy of a rational and strategic opinion author, establishing that the author has an incentive to go beyond the four most ideologically proximate Justices in building a majority coalition. And because of later interpreters’ negative reactions to narrow coalitions, the law ends up being less ideological than the Justices themselves

All Relationships Dissipate Except This: The Attitude-Behavior Link on the Roberts Court

This Article identifies several reasons that may explain the observed relationship between the ideology of Supreme Court justices and their voting behavior once on the Supreme Court. Segal measures the ideology of justices using newspaper editorial in prominent papers as they appear between the President’s nomination and the justice’s confirmation by the Senate, while tracking the voting behavior of justices as reported by Segal and Cover. The Article concludes, contrary to belief based on psychology and other sciences, that this relationship between ideology and behavior will continue because of the importance of the Supreme Court in national affairs, and greater participation of interest groups in the political process, among others