Replication data for: The Norm of Consensus on the U.S. Supreme Court

For four decades scholars have sought to explain the rise of dissensus on the U.S. Supreme Court. While the specific explanations they offer vary, virtually all rest on a common story: During the 19th (and into the 20th) century, the Supreme Court followed a norm of consensus. That is, the justices may have privately disagreed over the outcomes of cases but masked their disagreement from the public by producing consensual opinions. The problem with this story is that its underlying assumption lacks an empirical basis. Simply put, there is no systematic evidence to show that a norm of consensus ever existed on the Court. We attempt to provide such evidence by turning to the docket books of Chief Justice Waite (1874-1888), and making the following argument: If a norm of consensus induced unanimity on Courts of by-gone eras, then the norm may have manifested itself through public unanimity in the face of private conference disagreements. Our investigation, which provides systematic support for this argument and thus for the existence of a norm of consensus, raises important questions about publicly -unified decision-making bodies, be they courts or other political organizations

Assessing Preference Change on the U.S. Supreme Court ∗

the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences with funds from the University Initiatives Fund at the University of Washington. Supplementary results, a replication dataset, and documented C++ code to estimate the model using the Scythe Statistical Library (Martin and Quinn, 2001) are available in a web appendix at the authors ’ websites. The datasets were built from the Original United States Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, 2001a), the Vinson-Warren Court Database (Spaeth, 2001b), and a dataset generously provided by Le

Replication data for: Do Political Preferences Change? A Longitudinal Study of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

Do the political preferences of U.S. Supreme Court justices change over time? Judicial specialists are virtually unanimous in their response: The occasional anomaly not withstanding, most jurists evince consistent behavior over the course of their careers. Still, for all the research that presupposes the consistency of preferences, it is startling to find that scholars have yet to explore rigorously the assumption of stability. We fill this gap by describing the behavioral patterns of the 16 justices who sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for 10 or more terms, and began and completed their service sometime between the 1937 and 1993 terms. The data reveal that many experienced significant change over time—a result with important implications for virtually all longitudinal work on the Court

The Supreme Court in the American legal system /

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.Judicial policy making -- Approaches to judicial decision making -- The Supreme Court in American legal history -- Civil procedure -- Evidence -- Criminal procedure -- State courts -- The U.S. District Courts -- The U.S. Courts of Appeals -- Staffing the court -- Getting into court -- Supreme Court decision making -- Opinions and assignments -- The impact of judicial decisions