Judicial Retirements and the Staying Power of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

The influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions depends critically on how these opinions are received and treated by lower courts, which decide the vast majority of legal disputes. We argue that the retirement of Justices on the Supreme Court serves as a simple heuristic device for lower court judges in deciding how much deference to show to Supreme Court precedent. Using a unique dataset of the treatment of all Supreme Court majority opinions in the courts of appeals from 1953 to 2012, we find that negative treatments of Supreme Court opinions increase, and positive treatments decrease, as the Justices who supported a decision retire from the Court. Importantly, this effect exists over and above the impact of retirements on the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court

Why the Voting Gap Matters

Over the last half-century, affluent Americans have turned out to vote at significantly higher rates than lower-income Americans

The Long and the Short of It: The Influence of Briefs on Outcomes in the Roberts Court

This Article considers the role of information, affected groups, and persuasion in the connection between justice votes and the content of briefs in the Roberts Court. Hazelton, Hinkle, and Spriggs shed new light on the previously observed finding that the side with the most briefs is more likely to win. The authors find that the true advantage lies in providing the Court with a greater amount of information overall, and that holding total information constant, a greater number of briefs is, surprisingly, a disadvantage

Warren Court Precedents in the Rehnquist Court

Part of Symposium: The Rehnquist Court in Empirical and Statistical Retrospectiv

Judicial Selection: Politics, Biases, and Constituency Demands

The determinants of recent U.S. district court judges and appellate court judges selection have been subject of much debate, but little systematic evidence has been presented to substantiate claims regarding discrimination against particular groups of judicial nominees, nor regarding the length of the appointment process. We study both the length of the nominations process, and the likelihood of confirmation and emphasize the role of Senatorial seniority and agenda control in the confirmations process. We find that Senators with agenda control have a positive effect on the speed and likelihood of confirmation and that nominees from states with comparatively senior Senators receive expedited treatment relative to other nominees. Although politics matter in the confirmation process, Senators are responsive to perceived “shortage” of judges, since they fill seats faster when a relatively large number of court seats are vacant. Nominees with higher personal qualifications are also more likely to experience success in confirmations. We found no evidence of gender or race discrimination on the part of the Senate.judicial selection, discrimination

Essays on the Role of Law in Judicial Decision Making

Forty years ago C. Herman Prichett: 1969) observed that [P]olitical scientists who have done so much to put the `political\u27 in `political jurisprudence\u27 need to emphasize that it is still `jurisprudence.\u27 In this dissertation project I seek to help correct this imbalance by providing three fresh approaches to understanding how legal factors influence the choices judges and justices make. Essay 1 focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s agenda setting decisions. Drawing from the archival papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, I analyze the extent to which considerations such as legal conflict among the circuit courts motivate justices to deviate from casting a policy-based agenda setting vote. Essay 2 focuses on the opinion writing process on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. In particular, I ask what factors lead judges on the circuit courts to cite some legally relevant previous opinions while omitting others? Finally, Essay 3, which also examines circuit court opinion writing, explores the determinants of how judges choose to positively or negatively interpret relevant previous decisions in a given issue area. In sum, this pro ject seeks to provide an important contribution to our substantive understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court and the circuit courts while simultaneously attempting to demonstrate that both legal and policy considerations influence judicial decision making

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

A Patent Reformist Supreme Court and Its Unearthed Precedent

How is it that the Supreme Court, a generalist court, is leading a project of innovation reform in our times while the court of appeals established to encourage innovation is having its precedent stricken down time and again? This decade the Supreme Court has issued far more patent law decisions than in any decade since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952. In doing so, the Supreme Court has overruled the Federal Circuit in roughly threequarters of the patent cases in which the Supreme Court has issued opinions. In most of these cases, the Supreme Court has established rules that favor accused infringers over patent holders, and the result has been an era of patent litigation reform far more impactful than anything Congress has achieved. Scholars have observed that the Supreme Court tends to overrule Federal Circuit decisions that (1) impose rigid legal rules as opposed to flexible standards; (2) adopt special rules for patent law cases rather than applying general principles of law and equity applicable to all federal cases; and/or (3) fail to grant sufficient discretion to the district courts. This paper examines the twenty-eight Supreme Court opinions overruling the Federal Circuit since 2000 and quantifies their rationales to discover that, while these reasons are often invoked, the Supreme Court’s most common rationale is that the Federal Circuit has disregarded or cabined its older precedent from before the 1982 creation of the Federal Circuit, from before the 1952 Patent Act, and even from before the 20th Century. The Court has relied on this rationale in twenty-one of the twenty-eight cases. The paper then seeks to probe beneath the surface level patterns to discover the deeper roots of the discord between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit. Constitutional law scholars have observed that the Supreme Court’s policy preferences are the primary, unstated motivation behind its decisions. The Court writes opinions that rely on the flexible tools of precedent and stare decisis in order to implement its policy choices while maintaining its institutional reputation for neutrality. The Court does this by influencing precedent vitality; the Court selects which of its precedent to rely upon and augment and which of its precedent to distinguish and narrow. This process runs in direct conflict with the Federal Circuit, a court that was originally conceived and viewed by some of its members as a court intended to bring uniformity to patent law in a way that would reinvigorate patent rights. The Federal Circuit would implement the 1952 Patent Act in a way that would draw patent law out of the nineteenth century. But for the Supreme Court, the 1952 Act was a mere codification of patent law as developed by the courts for over a hundred years. Hence, the Federal Circuit seeks to influence precedent vitality at direct cross-purposes with the Supreme Court. The result of the Supreme Court’s project has been a new era of common law patent reform in favor of accused infringers, which is gaining momentum as the Supreme Court decides far more patent cases than it has since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952

Rain, ElectionS and MOney : The impact of voter turnout on distributive policy outcomes in japan

Does voter turnout affect policy outcomes? This long-standing question has been re-visited recently with close empirical scrutiny. These studies, however, commonly suffer from a problem of omitting variables correlated with both causal and outcome variables : specifically, immeasurable political interactions between politicians, organised groups, and individual voters. We address this problem by exploiting an instrument based on new data measuring the amount of rainfall on the voting day. It is a valid instrument not only because it is correlated with voter turnout and uncorrelated with politically relevant omitted variables, but also because it is expected to satisfy the assumption of homogeneous partial effects, which has not been carefully examined in previous studies that took advantage of instrumental variables. Using a large, municipality-level data set from Japan, we show that the turnout effect on the amounts of intergovernmental fiscal transfers is indeed significant, positive, and large.Election, Money, Rain, voter turnout, Japan, distributive policy