The Transmission of Legal Precedent among State Supreme Courts in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Theories of legislative policy diffusion are well formed and extensively tested, but scholars know far less about the diffusion of legal policy and reasoning. Three decades ago, Caldeira's "The Transmission of Legal Precedent: A Study of State Supreme Courts" examined this topic, but the intervening decades have been marked by considerable changes in both technology and the institutional structure of state supreme courts. We explore the effect of these changes by explaining modern translegal judicial communication in the United States. Relying on an original dataset encompassing every citation in every legal decision made by all 52 state supreme courts in 2010, we explore the effect of the proximity of two states and the prestige of the cited court on how frequently state high courts use one another's precedents. We find evidence that both proximity and prestige increase cross-state citations.The fact that the American states serve as laboratories of democracy has been long acknowledged by scholars and politicians alike. The presence of 50 distinct state governments with extensive policymaking responsibilities frequently enables one state government to observe the consequences of a particular policy decision before it adopts that policy. With this in mind, the state politics literature has a long tradition of exploring the determinants of state legislatures' decisions to look outside their borders

The Intergroup Foundations of Policy Influence

“…Ideas transmit more readily between political entities that share features in common. This notion has fueled a robust literature on the diffusion of policies across geographic lines (see, for example, Berry and Berry 1990; Caldeira 1985; Canon and Baum 1981; Hinkle and Nelson 2016). For example, states often adopt policies that have been enacted in neighboring states (Berry and Berry 1990; Hinkle 2015a).…”

An Update to the Squire State Court of Last Resort Professionalization Index

“…Consequently, it would seem unlikely that any findings produced using the original 2004 index would be disturbed by the use of the recoded version. A test of that proposition appears in the Appendix, which shows that substituting the recoded 2004 court professionalization measure for the original version used in Hinkle and Nelson's (2016) court citation study changes the relevant coefficient only slightly and does not alter the statistical results or substantive story (interestingly, substituting the 2019 measure does not change the analysis in terms of substance, but strengthens it statistically).…”

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

“…More frequently cited opinions not only have a greater ability to impact the development of legal policy (Nelson and Hinkle, ; Posner, ), but they also can influence the prestige of the opinion author (Caldeira, ; Hinkle and Nelson, ) and allow for the transmission of legal logic from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (Canon and Baum, ). Given the importance of state high courts in this process, understanding how qualities of a given precedent affect how frequently it is cited in state high courts has important implications for our broader understanding of why some precedents have a greater impact than others on the development and evolution of the law.…”