The Influence of Oral Arguments on the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract

W e posit that Supreme Court oral arguments provide justices with useful information that influences their final votes on the merits. To examine the role of these proceedings, we ask the following questions: (1) what factors influence the quality of arguments presented to the Court; and, more importantly, (2) does the quality of a lawyer's oral argument affect the justices' final votes on the merits? We answer these questions by utilizing a unique data source--evaluations Justice Blackmun made of the quality of oral arguments presented to the justices. Our analysis shows that Justice Blackmun's grading of attorneys is somewhat influenced by conventional indicators of the credibility of attorneys and are not simply the product of Justice Blackmun's ideological leanings. We thus suggest they can plausibly be seen as measuring the quality of oral argument. We further show that the probability of a justice voting for a litigant increases dramatically if that litigant's lawyer presents better oral arguments than the competing counsel. These results therefore indicate that this element of the Court's decisional process affects final votes on the merits, and it has implications for how other elite decision makers evaluate and use information.

Lower Court Influence on U.S. Supreme Court Opinion Content

“…The effect of ideology is so ubiquitous that it influences the justices' decision making in a host of contexts, including the Court's agenda setting (e.g., Perry 1991), the justices' receptivity to oral arguments (e.g., Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs 2006), the treatment of litigant briefs (e.g.,…”

Emotions, Oral Arguments, and Supreme Court Decision Making

“…Second, we add to the mounting evidence that scholars must understand the entire decision-making process in order to have the most accurate picture of how actors decide. In particular, we add to the literature that demonstrates justices' behavior during the oral argument phase of this process plays a key role in signaling the decisions they will ultimately make (Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs 2006). Third, we speak to the debate concerning how justices' preferences over case outcomes affect their decisions.…”

“…On this account, oral arguments influence case outcomes because they give justices an opportunity to clear up lingering questions from the briefs and to gauge their colleagues' views (Johnson 2004;Wasby, D'Amato, and Metrailer 1976). Research also demonstrates the quality of arguments influences justices' decisions (Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs 2006;McGuire and McAtee 2007).…”

Lawyer rankings either do not matter for litigation outcomes or are redundant

“…It therefore follows that there ought to be an association between rankings and outcomes. We know, for example, that judges' evaluations of lawyers' performances in particular cases are predictive of appellate outcomes (Johnson et al, 2006), which warrants the idea that judges' evaluations of lawyers' performances in general ought to be predictive in the same way.…”

“…The literature in political science has concentrated on appellate outcomes, which can in most cases be reduced to a binary variable (either the appeal succeeds or it does not), and which has employed indirect measures of lawyer quality (for example: Justice Blackmun's letter grades assigned to counsel at oral argument (Johnson et al, 2006) or experience (Haynie and Sill, 2007) or senior counsel status (Szmer et al, 2007) or past record (Hanretty, 2013)) to test whether better counsel win more appeals. A more general literature in empirical legal studies has focused on continuous outcomes, sometimes monetary outcomes in personal injury cases (Moorhead et al, 1994;Rosenthal, 1974) but more often sentence lengths in criminal trials, where the stakes are particularly high for clients (Abrams and Yoon, 2007;Shinall, 2010).…”