The Supreme Court's Certiorari Decisions

Conflict as a Predictive Variable

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7595445
AutoresSidney Ulmer, S Sidney Ulmer (University of Kentucky, autor de correspondencia)
Año1984
Volumen78
Número4
Páginas901-911
Fecha de publicación1984-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1955797
OpenAlexW2318801493
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas44
Referencias citadas11

In the period from 1947 to 1976, the United States Supreme Court has denied certiorari in more than half the cases involving conflict with Supreme Court precedent or intercircuit conflict. In both instances, the denial rate has been higher in the Burger Court than in the Vinson and Warren Courts and denial has been greater for intercircuit conflict cases than for cases in which the ruling in the lower court was in conflict with one or more Supreme Court precedents. When conflict was conceptualized as a predictor of decision and examined along with federal government as petitioning party, economic issues, and civil liberty issues, it was found to have 4 to 7 times the predictive power of the other variables combined for the Vinson and Warren Courts. For the Burger Court, the petitioning party variable was found to be a better predictor than conflict, but conflict was a much better predictor than the subject variables. Discriminant function models using the four predictor variables were able to account for up to 36.9% of the variance in the Supreme Court's certiorari decisions, almost all of which was the result of the contributions made by the conflict and party factors

Certiorari · Court of record · Denial · Majority opinion · Original jurisdiction · Political science · Supreme court · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Psychology