A Neo-Institutional Explanation of State Supreme Court Responses in Search and Seizure Cases

Abstract

The relationship between the Supreme Court and lower courts is more complicated than it may appear at first glance. In order to better understand this relationship, we examine how Supreme Court precedent affects state supreme court decision-making. Toward this end, we investigate whether and how Supreme Court precedent impacts lower court decisions. Examining state supreme court decisions in the area of search and seizure, we specifically test hypotheses about how state judicial context and Supreme Court behavior influences when the lower court is likely to be affected by Supreme Court precedent. We address the nature of state supreme court responses to Supreme Court precedent in search and seizure cases decided between 1983 and 1993. We find that there is substantial variation in the responses to precedent by state supreme courts. Specifically, we find that precedent does have a substantial influence on the behavior of state supreme court justices, but judicial ideology and the level of historical conflict between the Supreme Court and the state supreme court are also important in understanding the dissemination of precedent to the states. Most interestingly, the effect of judicial retention methods on the application of precedent are considerable.

Gay Rights, the New Judicial Federalism, and State Supreme Courts: Disentangling the Effects of Ideology and Judicial Independence

“…The PAJID scores of elected justices are based on voter ratings, while those of appointed justices are based on political elite ratings, with these ratings being weighted in both cases to adjust for differences in justices' partisan affiliations. Developed by Brace, Langer, and Hall (2000), these scores have been used in a large body of research on state supreme courts-research that includes analyses of these courts' jurisprudence in specific areas of the law, such as, for example, the death penalty (Brace and Boyea 2008), search and seizure (Comparato and McClurg 2007), worker's compensation (Langer 2003), and, notably, gay rights (Lewis, Wood, and Jacobsmeier 2014). They have also been used in more general analyses of institutional constraints on ideological voting (Randazzo, Waterman, and Fix 2010).…”

The Effect of Opinion Readability on the Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents in State High Courts

“…However, we depart from Nelson and Hinkle (2018) in terms of the scope of our study by focusing on citation patterns for all U.S. Supreme Court opinions by state high courts. State high courts, in contrast to lower federal courts, have significantly more flexibility in how they incorporate the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court into state law (Comparato and McClurg, 2007;Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, 2017;Hoekstra, 2005). This enhanced freedom means that their decision to use (or not use) a particular precedent is going to be influenced by a variety of factors related to the precedent.…”

A Common-Space Measure of State Supreme Court Ideology

“…These linkages include outcomes in sex discrimination cases (Gryski, Main, and Dixon 1986), diversity on the bench (Glick and Emmert 1987;Hurwitz and Lanier 2003); the likelihood of dissenting opinions (Boyea 2010;Shepherd 2010); votes on capital punishment cases Hall 1995, 1997;Brace and Boyea 2008); rates of litigation (Hanssen 1999); size of tort awards (Tabarrok and Helland 1999); decisions on judicial review cases (Langer 2002(Langer , 2003; court responses to search and seizure precedent (Comparato and McClurg 2007); strategic voting to secure retention (Shepherd 2009a,c); the extent to which legislatures constrain judicial behavior (Randazzo, Waterman, and Fix 2010); and quality of opinion writing and productivity (Choi, Gulati, and Posner 2010). The general theme in these studies is that institutional design (i.e., the method of selection) matters.…”