Voting Fluidity and the Attitudinal Model of Supreme Court Decision Making

Slaying the Dragon: Segal, Spaeth and the Function of Law in Supreme Court Decision Making

“…The lack of change from original positions in progeny cases suggests that a majority is not able to appeal to precedent to get a marginal justice to join the majority vote on the merits, and the authors' data suggests that appeals to precedent rarely ever changed the construction of the majority position on the merits. Spaeth's previous collaborative work- (Brenner, Hagle, and Spaeth 1990;Brenner and Spaeth 1988;Hagle and Spaeth 1991;Rohde and Spaeth 1989;Spaeth and Altfield 1985) provides additional evidence in support of the claim that internal court legal arguments as well as goal-oriented use of interpersonal relationships, opinion assignment tactics, and vote trading by the justices-all employed to construct minimum winning coalitions-do not have a significant effect on votes on the merits. Despite the evidence, nevertheless, that political attitudes outweigh power seeking in coalition construction, the hypothesis that attitudes influence coalition formation deserves more examination.…”

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making, Case Salience, and the Attitudinal Model

“…In high salience cases a justice's position is relatively fixed and the chance is relatively low that new information will change that position (Brenner & Palmer 1988). It is for this reason that Hagle and Spaeth (1991) reported that fluidity is less likely in cases that are highly salient. In addition, we know from the Brennan and Marshall papers that conference deliberations and intra‐court bargaining are more intense when the case is highly salient than when the case is not (Epstein & Knight 1998: 74).…”

Undocumented youth in limbo: the impact of America’s immigration enforcement policy on juvenile deportations

“…7 Of particular interest to us is the role of the immigration policy context in which the immigration court is immersed -as epitomized by the intensity of interior immigration enforcement. According to existing theories on the determinants of judicial behavior, immigration judges' rulings are influenced by the environment in which they live and work, which reasonably shapes their experiences and beliefs (Hagle andSpaeth 1991, Gillman andClayton 1999). Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that, ceteris paribus, immigration judges in courts located in less immigrant-friendly areas might have rulings that significantly differ from those received by their counterparts in areas where immigration enforcement has not been severely intensified.…”

“…The judicial literature has pointed out a number of key determinants of judges' decision-making. Judges might make decisions that take into account their preferences (Hagle and Spaeth 1991), but also institutional factors in place (Landes and Posner 1975, Gillman and Clayton 1999, Hanssen 2004.…”