Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court

Bailey, Michael; Maltzman, Forrest

doi:10.1017/s0003055408080283

Cited by 110 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Segal and Spaeth (2002), Bailey and Maltzman (2008), Benjamin and Desmarais (2012), Epstein et al (2007a), Segal and Spaeth (1996)). While there are important limits (i.e.…”

Section: Data and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach

2014

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Building upon developments in theoretical and applied machine learning, as well as the efforts of various scholars including Guimerà and Sales-Pardo (2011), Ruger et al. (2004), andMartin et al. (2004), we construct a model designed to predict the voting behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. Using the extremely randomized tree method first proposed in Geurts et al. (2006), a method similar to the random forest approach developed in Breiman (2001), as well as novel feature engineering, we predict more than sixty years of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States . Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7% of the Court's overall affirm / reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes. Our performance is consistent with the general level of prediction offered by prior scholars. However, our model is distinctive as it is the first robust, generalized, and fully predictive model of Supreme Court voting behavior offered to date. Our model predicts six decades of behavior of thirty Justices appointed by thirteen Presidents. With a more sound methodological foundation, our results represent a major advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications, such as those described in Katz (2013).

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“…Segal and Spaeth (2002), Bailey and Maltzman (2008), Benjamin and Desmarais (2012), Epstein et al (2007a), Segal and Spaeth (1996)). While there are important limits (i.e.…”

Section: Data and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach

2014

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“…Therefore, it is charged with the responsibility of providing guidance and clear signals to lower court judges and lawyers about how its doctrines should be interpreted. Efficient management of the lower courts and an instinct to maintain its institutional legitimacy prevents the Court from producing frequent, wholesale reversals of its precedents.Adopting some of these arguments in response to the attitudinal model, alternative perspectives contend that although ideology influences justices' choices, the law exerts an independent and concurrent influence as well (e.g., Bailey and Maltzman 2008;Baum 1997;George and Epstein 1992;Pritchett 1954;Richards and Kritzer 2002). I refer to such models as "hybrid models," and one of the most influential is Richards and Kritzer's (2002) "jurisprudential regimes theory," which posits that certain precedents create jurisprudential regimes-essentially legal doctrines created by the justices to structure future decision making-highlighting how legal standards should apply to certain types of fact situations.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Constraining Capacity of Legal Doctrine on the U.S. Supreme Court

Bartels

2009

Am Polit Sci Rev

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D oes law exhibit a significant constraint on Supreme Court justices' decisions? Although proponents of the attitudinal model argue that ideology predominantly influences justices ' choices, "hybrid models" posit I n politics and government, institutions-both rules and norms-operate as important constraints that structure the decision-making processes of actors. Legislators, judges, bureaucrats, voters, and other actors make decisions within an institutional context defined by formal and informal rules that constrain individual discretion and ultimately shape actors' choices (e.g., March and Olsen 1984;McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987;North 1990;Rohde 1991;Shepsle 1979). On the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices' institutional context is almost completely dominated by a web of informal rules, or norms (e.g., Epstein and Knight 1998;Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000;Murphy 1964). Perhaps the most important norm on the Court is stare decisis, or precedent, which is a facet of "the law" prescribing how past decisions should guide choices in current and related cases. 1 Supreme Court justices make rules by issuing precedents that contain legal doctrines intended to constrain not only lower court judges and actors in the political environment, but also themselves and future justices. Legal doctrines, like rules in other contexts, prescribe certain outcomes under various conditions. Consequently, legal doctrine is capable of restricting the range of viable policy alternatives, which serves to limit individual discretion in decision making by lower courts and future Supreme Courts (a la McCubbins, Brandon L. Bartels is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 2115 G Street, NW, 440 Monroe Hall, Washington, DC 20052 (bartels.20@gmail.com).A previous version of this article was presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. I am extremely grateful to Lawrence Baum for his valuable comments and suggestions at all stages of this project. Thanks also to Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Roman Ivanchenko, Lindsey Levitan, Rene Lindstaedt, Kathleen McGraw, Jeffrey Segal, Joel Simmons, Oleg Smirnov, and Elliot Slotnick for their helpful suggestions. I thank Mark Richards and Herbert Kritzer for sharing their data. Finally, I am grateful to the APSR editors and three anonymous reviewers for extremely valuable feedback and suggestions. 1 In addition to precedent, other facets of the law include plain meaning and intent underlying the U.S. Constitution and statutes (see, e.g., Gates and Phelps 1996;Howard and Segal 2002). Noll, and Weingast 1987). Through this mechanism, legal doctrine allows the Court to exert control over the future course of legal policy (Bueno de Mesquita and Stephenson 2002;Jacobi and Tiller 2007). From a normative point of view, adherence to precedent sends a signal to the legal community and the mass public that the Court's legal interpretations contain considerable continuity and do not change simply because of membership chang...

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“…Supreme Court opinions, as well as those of other common-law courts, are in large part important for the precedent that they set, not only for the individual disputes that they resolve. Recent analyses have adopted strategic models to explain issues related to precedent, such as when the Court overturns its own precedent (Spriggs and Hansford 2001), the Court's interpretation of precedent (Spriggs and Hansford 2002), the extent to which precedent affects judicial decisions (Bailey and Maltzman 2008), and the relationship between the age of a precedent and the likelihood that it will be followed (Hansford and Spriggs 2006).…”

Section: Strategic Behavior On the Us Supreme Courtmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As scholars have increasingly recognized this, the role of legal doctrine in judicial decision making has gained prominence in the academic literature (Bailey and Maltzman 2008;Gennaioli and Shleifer 2007;Bartels 2009;Landa and Lax 2009;Lax 2011). Changes to the law are reflected not only in the outcomes of cases but also in the content of judicial opinions (Tiller and Cross 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Citations to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court

Lupu¹,

Fowler²

2013

The Journal of Legal Studies

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Common law evolves not only through the outcomes of cases but also through the reasoning and citations to precedent employed in judicial opinions. We focus on citations to precedent by the U.S. Supreme Court. We demonstrate how strategic interaction between justices during the Court's bargaining process affects citations to precedent in the Court's opinion. We find that the majority-opinion writer relies more heavily on precedent when the Court's decision is accompanied by separate opinions. We also show that diversity of opinion on the Court, a factor often overlooked, has a significant relationship with citations to precedent. Finally, our results indicate that the ideology of the median justice influences citation practices more than ideology of the majority-opinion writer.

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Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court

Cited by 110 publications

References 46 publications

Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach

Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach

The Constraining Capacity of Legal Doctrine on the U.S. Supreme Court

Strategic Citations to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court

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