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

Trumping the First Amendment?

The primary goal of this Essay is to assess whether the relationship between the ideology of Supreme Court Justices and their support for the First Amendment guarantees of speech, press, assembly, and association has declined, such that left-of-center Justices no longer consistently support those guarantees, and right-of-center Justices no longer consistently support their regulation. Utilizing data drawn from the 1953 through 2004 terms of the Court, we show that, in disputes in which only First Amendment claims are at issue, the more liberal the Justice, the higher the likelihood that he or she will vote in favor of litigants alleging an abridgment of their rights. That relationship, however, fails to emerge in disputes in which other values, such as privacy and equality, are also prominently at stake. In these cases, liberal Justices are no more likely than their conservative counterparts to support the First Amendment; indeed, if anything, a reversal of sorts occurs, with conservatives more likely, and liberals less likely, to vote in favor of the speech, press, assembly, or association claim. Taken collectively, these results indicate that commitment to First Amendment values is no longer a lodestar of liberalism. We consider the implications of these findings in light of long-held assumptions of (quantitative) political science work on the Court

Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court\u27s Certiorari Decisions

We examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court and its derision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own preferences, exploiting ambiguity in cases\u27 fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from lower courts regardless of the facts of die case or the relative ideology of the judges. But a conservative higher court probabilistically reviews liberal decisions, with the audit rate tied to observable facts and the ideology of the lower court judge. We derive comparative static results and rest them with a random sample of search-and-seizure cases appealed to the Burger Court between 1972 and 1986. The evidence broadly supports the model

The Supreme Court During Crisis: How War Affects only Non-War Cases

Does the U.S. Supreme Court curtail rights and liberties when the nation’s security is under threat? In hundreds of articles and books, and with renewed fervor since September 11, 2001, members of the legal community have warred over this question. Yet, not a single large-scale, quantitative study exists on the subject. Using the best data available on the causes and outcomes of every civil rights and liberties case decided by the Supreme Court over the past six decades and employing methods chosen and tuned especially for this problem, our analyses demonstrate that when crises threaten the nation’s security, the justices are substantially more likely to curtail rights and liberties than when peace prevails. Yet paradoxically, and in contradiction to virtually every theory of crisis jurisprudence, war appears to affect only cases that are unrelated to the war. For these cases, the effect of war and other international crises is so substantial, persistent, and consistent that it may surprise even those commentators who long have argued that the Court rallies around the flag in times of crisis. On the other hand, we find no evidence that cases most directly related to the war are affected. We attempt to explain this seemingly paradoxical evidence with one unifying conjecture: Instead of balancing rights and security in high stakes cases directly related to the war, the justices retreat to ensuring the institutional checks of the democratic branches. Since rights-oriented and process-oriented dimensions seem to operate in different domains and at different times, and often suggest different outcomes, the predictive factors that work for cases unrelated to the war fail for cases related to the war. If this conjecture is correct, federal judges should consider giving less weight to legal principles established during wartime for ordinary cases, and attorneys should see it as their responsibility to distinguish cases along these lines.Governmen

Ideology and the Study of Judicial Behavior

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116253/1/IdPsychLaw.pd

The Bush Imprint on the Supreme Court: Why Conservatives Should Continue to Yearn and Liberals Should Not Fear

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116213/1/tulsa08.pd

Circuit Effects: How the Norm of Federal Judicial Experience Biases the Supreme Court

For the first time in American history, all nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court came to their positions directly from U.S. courts of appeals. As new vacancies arise in the coming years, should the President continue to look to the circuits for Supreme Court nominees? Commentators disagree on the answer. Those who support the current practice claim that the Senate is more likely to confirm nominees with judicial experience. Proponents also argue that former federal judges are more likely to reach decisions based on precedent rather than on their own ideological values. Those opposed to current practice point to the costs of elevating federal judges. Among the most pernicious may be “circuit effects,” or the possibility that former U.S. courts of appeals judges are predisposed toward affirming decisions of the institutions they just left—their respective federal circuits. We enter this debate not by rehashing the existing arguments, but by exploring them empirically. From our analyses, a clear conclusion emerges: the benefits of drawing Supreme Court Justices from the circuits are, at best, overstated, while the costs are, at a minimum, understated. Indeed, the data reveal a strong predilection on the part of Justices with federal judicial experience to rule in favor of their respective home court. For some, the attachment is so strong that they are twice as likely to affirm decisions coming from their former circuit as decisions coming from all others. Even more striking is the advantage now enjoyed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—the former home of four sitting Supreme Court Justices. An obvious antidote is for the President to end the practice of appointing Supreme Court Justices from the circuits, and instead turn to the nation’s law schools, law firms, legislatures, executives, and state courts. A less obvious, though no less plausible, remedy is for the President to select nominees from circuits underrepresented on the Court.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116212/1/penn09.pd