Rachael K. Hinkle, Academia.edu, "Legal Constraint in the US Courts of Appeals" (originally published The University of Chicago Press "the jouranl of politics," Volume 77, Number 3 July 2015) (original) (raw)
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Legal Constraint in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
Existing evidence of law constraining judicial behavior is subject to serious endogeneity concerns. Federal circuit courts offer an opportunity to gain leverage on this problem. A precedent is legally binding within its own circuit but only persuasive in other circuits. Legal constraint exists to the extent that use of binding precedents is less influenced by ideology than use of persuasive precedents. Focusing on search and seizure cases, I construct a choice set of published circuit cases from 1953 to 2010 that cite the Fourth Amendment. I model the use of precedent in cases from 1990 to 2010, using matching to ensure that binding and persuasive precedents are otherwise comparable. The less visible decision of which cases to cite shows no evidence of legal constraint, while there is consistent evidence that the more readily observable act of negatively treating a cited precedent is constrained by the legal doctrine of stare decisis. 1. Prior to 2007, some circuits prohibited citation to unpublished opinions (Gant 2005). 2. The author's extensive control over the content of the opinion suggests the importance of opinion assignment. The assignment is typically made by the most senior active (i.e., not retired) judge on the panel (Cheng 2008). 3. Following Hansford and Spriggs (2006), I refer to the case where a judge is making these decisions as a treatment case to distinguish it from a precedent.
The Impact of Supreme Court Signals and Circuit Effects on Responses to Precedent
Social Science Research Network, 2014
An extensive literature suggests that U.S. Supreme court justices are policy entrepreneurs who are strongly concerned with the impact of their decisions. Such a concern for the policy impact of their decisions raises a number of puzzles: 1) under what conditions do Court precedents have the broadest impact on the lower courts? 2) What motivates the circuits to respond differently to Supreme Court precedent? 3) What, if any, strategies does the Court employ to influence the responses of the courts below? These queries require scholars to examine the aggregate impact of the decisions of the Court. We provide a framework for aggregate lower court responses to Court precedent. We argue that given the finite ability of the Supreme Court to review the large number of lower court decisions, justices of the Court should primarily be interested in aggregate patterns of compliance. We posit that a signal by the Supreme Court in the form of its summary decisions and a number of circuit-level influences primarily drive lower court responses to Court precedent. The empirical results provide robust support for our account.
2015
J udicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S.Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—ofthe law on justices ’ decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial restraint, and a strict interpretation of the First Amendment’s protection of speech clause. We find considerable evidence that legal factors play an important role in Supreme Court decision making. We also find that the effect of legal factors varies across justices. We don’t turn a matter over to a judge because we want his view about what the best idea is, what the best solution is. It is because we want him or her to apply the law....They are constrained when they do that....They need to be bound down by rules and precedents:... the rules, ...
Ideology and Judicial Deference in the D.C. Circuit
Southeastern Political Review
This article examines the published opinions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit-a key judicial forum for deciding administrative law appeals-to test the hypothesis that ideology is a principal element for understanding judicial control over federal agencies between I970 and 1995. Prior studies focus on U.S. Supreme Court rulings imply, but do not directly test. the proposition that judicial deference to agencies is the product of an interactive relationship between key political variables. Using a non-additive, "integrated" model ofjudicial behavior, the study confirms that judicial deference is an interactive ideological decision where the court's decision to defer is conditioned upon an interaction between the panel's composition and agency policy. Ideology, though, is not the sole explanation for court behavior since other non-ideological variables contribute to deference as well. The D.C. Circuit is constrained, and defers less, by the "hard look" doctrine and landmark U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Even so, it defers more to agency rulemaking, making the rvpe of agency proceeding at issue an important variable.
The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent
We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002 in the United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and a significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren court. We further describe a method for creating authority scores using the network data to identify the most important Court precedents. This method yields rankings that conform closely to evaluations by legal experts, and even predicts which cases they will identify as important in the future. An analysis of these scores over time allows us to test several hypotheses about the rise and fall of precedent. We show that reversed cases tend to be much more important than other decisions, and the cases that overrule them quickly become and remain even more important as the reversed decisions decline. We also show that the Court is careful to ground overruling decisions in past precedent, and the care it exercises is increasing in the importance of the decision that is overruled. Finally, authority scores corroborate qualitative assessments of which issues and cases the Court prioritizes and how these change over time.
Activism, Attitudes, and the Citation of Precedent in Supreme Court Opinions
Adherence to precedent may provide a legitimizing function for judges. Recent scholarship supports this contention, demonstrating that Supreme Court justices are more likely to cite well-grounded precedent when their opinions face greater scrutiny. In this paper, I continue this line of research by examining whether citation practice varies along individual-level characteristics such as judicial ideology, a propensity for activism, judicial background, and judicial roles. I find that most individual-level factors have little or no impact on how justices ground their opinions in prior precedent, with the exception of judicial activism, which has a moderate negative impact on the centrality of the precedent cited. Individual variation in citation practice thus appears mainly idiosyncratic. However, I do uncover a strong interaction effect between ideology and activism, in which activist conservative justices write opinions with considerably less precedential centrality than other justices. This finding supports the narrative that the conservative legal framework entered a sea-change during the Burger and Rehnquist Court years.
Judicial Ideology and the Selection of Disputes for U.S. Supreme Court Adjudication
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2013
In political science, the well-known "attitudinal model" of legal decision making dictates that judges' sincere policy preferences drive legal outcomes. In contrast, the celebrated "selection hypothesis" from the law and economics literature suggests that litigants carefully consider factors affecting potential case success (including judicial ideology) and accordingly choose, in the name of efficiency, to settle or not pursue cases in which legal outcomes can be readily predicted. Thus, judges end up adjudicating a nonrandom set of cases that, in the typical situation, should not lend themselves to ideological judicial decision making. From this perspective, the influence of Supreme Court justices' ideological preferences on outcomes could be obviated by the forward-thinking decisions of mindful litigants. We are left with two dominant theories on jurisprudential outcomes that appear to be at odds with each other. We endeavor to address this situation by incorporating litigation case sorting considerations into a basic attitudinal account of Supreme Court justice decision making in environmental cases. Our primary thesis is that the influence of judicial ideology on legal outcomes is conditioned on case sorting decisions (by both litigants and justices) that precede the justices' voting decisions on the merits. We augment our assessment of this thesis by evaluating our basic model on a subset of cases involving the Court's most formidable litigator-the federal government. We find that in both scenarios, the influence of justices' attitudes on their merits voting is indeed conditioned on case sorting. We conclude that the effect of justices' attitudes on Supreme Court policy making likely works in both direct and indirect ways in that their known ideological proclivities may lead to the strategic sorting of cases for Supreme Court adjudication.
Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court
American Political Science Review, 2008
Judicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S. Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—of the law on justices' decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial restraint, and a strict interpretation of the First Amendment's protection of speech clause. We find considerable evidence that legal factors play an important role in Supreme Court decision making. We also find that the effect of legal factors varies across justices.
The Influence of Precedent on State Supreme Courts
Political Research Quarterly, 2012
""Studies of policy making by courts need to examine the actual policy adopted in the majority opinion rather than studying votes. The authors examine the responsiveness of state supreme courts to precedents announced by the US Supreme Court by examining their treatment of the precedents in their opinions, testing the utility of precedent vitality versus the impact of ideological preferences. They find that the vitality of Supreme Court precedent is a strong predictor of the way in which the precedent is treated by state courts, even after controlling for ideological distance and institutional features of state court systems.""