The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

Segal, Jeffrey A.; Spaeth, Harold J.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511615696

Cited by 1,066 publications

(702 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

665

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In the first half of the twentieth century, the realist movement stressed the role of personal choice in judging. Now, a common view in political science, that of Spaeth and Segal (1999) and Segal and Spaeth (2002), is even more extreme: law has little or no influence over the case votes of Supreme Court Justices. Richards and Kritzer (2002) pioneered a bold challenge to this view, arguing that law does affect these votes, that justices do make decisions as though bound by law.…”

Section: T He Founding Debate Of Judicial Politics-ismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many scholars have employed the regimes approach in other applications (e.g., Bartels and O'Geen 2008;Benesh and Martinek 2005;Buchman 2005;Luse et al 2007;Martinek 2008;Scott 2006;). Segal and Spaeth (2003) raise three concerns about the jurisprudential regimes approach. First, they criticize the Chow test on the full set of variables, which attributes meaning to changes in variables that have little to do with the alleged regime change.…”

Section: Law In the Courtmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?

Lax

Rader

2010

The Journal of Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The founding debate of judicial politics-is Supreme Court decision making driven by law or politics? -remains at center stage. One influential line of attack involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the influence of case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the Supreme Court justices themselves so that they vote as though constrained by precedent. We analyze whether binding jurisprudential regime change actually exists. The standard test assumes votes are independent observations, even though they are clustered by case and by term. We argue that a (nonparametric) ''randomization test'' is more appropriate. We find little evidence that precedents affect voting.

show abstract

Section: T He Founding Debate Of Judicial Politics-ismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Law In the Courtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?

Lax

Rader

2010

The Journal of Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Building on the pioneering work of Walter Murphy, 30 Lee Epstein, Jack Knight, and Thomas Walker observe how justices find legal and other excuses to refrain from challenging elected officials whenever striking down a government policy might provoke severe political retaliation. 31 Challenging proponents of the popular attitudinal model of judicial decision making, who claim that justices vote their sincere policy preferences, 32 proponents of the strategic model of judicial decision making insist that justices are sophisticated policy voters. " [T]he Justices cannot effectuate their own policy and institutional goals," Epstein, Knight, and Andrew Martin maintain, "without taking account of the goals and likely actions of the members of the other branches."…”

Section: "The Flowers That Bloom In the Spring"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Constitutionalism and Political Science: Imaginative Scholarship, Unimaginative Teaching

Graber¹

2005

PPS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Opinions are important because they provide justifications for the judgment. Those who subscribe to the attitudinal model of judging (Segal and Spaeth 2002)-which asserts that the decisions the Justices reach are due solely to politics-argue that opinions are nothing more than disingenuous post hoc rationalizations of behavior that merely serve to cover up nothing more than unfettered politics.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are some notable studies of judgments that take legal factors into account. Segal (1986) studies merit votes in searchand-seizure cases, and shows that a number of legal factors are indeed related to behavior, even when controlling for political ideology (see also Segal and Spaeth 2002). George and Epstein (1992) look at all Supreme Court death penalty cases from 1971 to 1988, and find that a model that integrates political factors and legal factors performs best.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes

Pang

Friedman²,

Martin³

et al. 2012

Polit. anal.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Edited by R. Michael AlvarezJurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate multiple change-point probit model that can be used to endogenously test for the existence of jurisprudential regimes. Unlike the previously employed methods, our model does so by estimating the locations of many possible changepoints along with structural parameters. We estimate the model using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and use Bayesian model comparison to determine the number of change-points. Our findings are consistent with jurisprudential regimes in the Establishment Clause and administrative law contexts. We find little support for hypothesized regimes in the areas of free speech and search-and-seizure. The Bayesian multivariate change-point model we propose has broad potential applications to studying structural breaks in either regular or irregular time-series data about political institutions or processes.1 Modeling Decision-Making on the U.S. Supreme Court Supreme Court decisions do two things: they award a judgment, and they provide a rationale for that judgment in the form of a written opinion. The judgment of the case determines who wins and who loses in the legal dispute, and the terms of the victory or defeat. Opinions are important because they provide justifications for the judgment. Those who subscribe to the attitudinal model of judging (Segal and Spaeth 2002)-which asserts that the decisions the Justices reach are due solely to politics-argue that opinions are nothing more than disingenuous post hoc rationalizations of behavior that merely serve to cover up nothing more than unfettered politics.Authors' note: The authors thank Bert Kritzer, Mark Richards, and Jeff Segal for sharing replication data; Jude Hayes and Robert Walker, along with seminar participants at SLAMM 2010, NYU, and USC for helpful comments; Katie Schon, Jee Seon Jeon, and Rachael Hinkle for their research assistance; and the Filomen D'Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at NYU School of Law, the Center for Empirical Research in the Law at Washington University, the Wang Xuelian Fund at Tsinghua University, and the National Science Foundation for supporting our research. The editor, R. Michael Alvarez, and two anonymous referees made suggestions that improved the article significantly. For replication data and code, see Pang et al. (2012). Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.Political Analysis (2012) On the other hand, from a legal standpoint, it is hard to believe that opinions are inconsequential (Friedman 2006). To be sure, opinions are justifications, but they also provide legal rules that govern in future disputes. In our common law system, lower court judges rely on the collection of these rules-called precedents-when deciding s...

show abstract

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

Abstract: Sheehan, C. (2011). Making the jurors the "experts": The case for eyewitness identification jury instructions.

Cited by 1,066 publications

References 0 publications

Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?

Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?

Constitutionalism and Political Science: Imaginative Scholarship, Unimaginative Teaching

Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About