Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space

Abstract

We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search and seizure and freedom of religion opinions written between 1953 and 2006 into these different types and develop a model relating the similarity of the doctrine embodied in the citing and cited opinions to the relative probability of these different types of citations. The resulting spatial estimates of opinion location are used to evaluate theories of Supreme Court bargaining and opinion writing. We find empirical support for theoretical models that predict the majority opinion will fall at the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition. Given the centrality of theories of judicial policymaking to various substantive problems in political science, the method of scaling opinions developed in this article can facilitate a range of future research.

Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?

“…This undermines the credibility of a threat to defect and therefore reduces the median justice's bargaining power. Empirical analysis of the ideological position of Supreme Court opinions (Clark and Lauderdale 2010) is consistent with this claim, as is our empirical investigation of concurrence behavior.…”

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

“…Recent studies of opinion content include Corley (2008), who argues that the language of party briefs is often used in the Court's opinions; Corley, Howard, and Nixon (2005), who analyze the rates of citations to the Federalist Papers in Court opinions over time; Hume (2006), who argues that Supreme Court justices strategically cite nonbinding texts and prominent authors; Way and Turner (2003), who conduct a content analysis of concurring opinions in the Rehnquist Court; and Choi and Gulati (2008), who argue that circuit court judges exhibit various biases in their citation choices. Others have used the content of opinions to place Court opinions along an ideological scale (McGuire et al 2009;Clark and Lauderdale 2010). A related literature analyzes how judicial behavior explains the evolution of legal doctrine (Jacobi and Tiller 2007;Landa and Lax 2009).…”

“…We thank Chris W. Bonneau insights into existing debates regarding judicial behavior (McGuire et al 2009;Corley 2008;Way and Turner 2003). A key dimension of opinion content on which scholars have focused is citations to precedent (Choi and Gulati 2008;Clark and Lauderdale 2010), which affect the legal interpretation of a case and its long-term impact (Fowler et al 2007).…”

Social Interactions and the Content of Legal Opinions

“…12 The main insight is that the panel's twin concerns to avoid the damage of a legal challenge, and obtain the extralegal benefit from an "applied" citation, combine to produce biased decision-making. Specifically, in the shaded region the panel chooses r i = r j (even though this decision is marginally less likely to be correct than r i = s) because it can then buttress its argument by appealing to a persuasive authority and cast the judges in case j in a positive light.…”