Lawrence Baum
Biographic Data
| ID | 3627140 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrence Baum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrence |
| FAMILY NAME | Baum |
| SIGNATURE | BAUM L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 500 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Apsa Organized Section Awards
In the tradition of Professor Fenno's work, this prize is designed to
Supreme Court Elections
This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts. 1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that h…
Apsa Committees
The Committee on Teaching and Learning develops and promotes activities within APSA and the political science community regarding political science and the practices and policies of higher education, including undergraduate
Linking Issues to Ideology in the Supreme Court
This article probes explanations for the linkages between Supreme Court justices’ broad ideological stances and their positions in specific issue areas. The justices’ votes in decisions on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment showed no consistent ideological pattern in the 1937–79 terms but have fallen along clear ideological lines since then. Analysis of relevant evidence indicates that this shift reflected both changes in the content of ta…
Aage Clausen
Aage Clausen, professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, died in January 2011 at the age of 78. He was an extraordinary person who made major contributions as a scholar and teacher and he was a remarkable individual who was much beloved as a colleague and friend
The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U.S. State Court Judgeships
Over the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U.S. states have become larger in scale. We analyze the impact of this development on voters' choices between candidates. Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting. We find that…
Judges and Their Audiences
What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and pol…
Response to Mark Graber's review of Judges and Their Audiences
I appreciate Mark Graber's review of Judges and Their Audiences. The review is generous, but it is also perceptive about the book's argument and its implications. As the author, I learned from Graber's thoughtful discussion of what I did and did not do in the book
Thesupremecourt Inamericanpolitics
The Supreme Court's role in American politics is a product of its interventions in public policy making and the impact of those interventions on government and society. The Court's frequent and substantial interventions during the past half century are especially striking, and their extent and their beneficiaries cannot be explained fully by major theories of the Court's behavior. The Court's rulings often receive negative responses from other po…
Enthusiasm in Teaching
All teachers develop their own ideas about teaching and learning, but most of us have too few opportunities to focus directly on those ideas. Over the past few years, teaching a course on college teaching for graduate students has given me such an opportunity. Two years ago, my participation in a panel at the Midwest Political Science Association meetings provided a chance to pull together some of my thoughts about the role of the teacher. This e…
Ballot Information and Voting Decisions in Judicial Elections
Selection of Law Clerks and Polarization in the U.S. Supreme Court
Scholars have pointed to signs of growing polarization in American politics along partisan and ideological lines. This article probes for polarization in the Supreme Court by examining the role of ideological considerations in the selection of law clerks. For the 1975-1998 terms of the Court, we analyzed the relationship between the justices' ideological positions and the positions of the lower court judges from whom the justices drew their clerk…
Ballot Information and Voting Decisions in Judicial Elections
Ballots used in the American states differ in the information that they provide about candidates. This article examines the effects of ballot information on voters' decisions whether and how to vote in individual contests, effects on which scholars have not yet provided direct evidence. The study employs experimental manipulations within pre-election and post-election surveys on three contests for seats on a state supreme court. Ballot informatio…
Inviting Congressional Action
Theory: The Supreme Court's occasional to Congress to reverse the Court's statutory decisions challenge two influential theories of the Court's behavior and thus merit attention. Hypotheses: Three altemative explanations for invitations are posited: low interest in certain cases on the part of the justices, a desire to maintain the Court's institutional standing, and a desire to achieve both good policy and good law. Methods: These altemative exp…
The Puzzle of Judicial Behavior
From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fates of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed and debated explanations of judicial behavior. This book examines the major issues in the debates over how best to understand judicial behavior and assesses what we actually know about how judges decide cases. It concludes that we are far from understanding why j…
The puzzle of judicial behavior
From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fate of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed and debated explanations of judicial behavior. With this book Lawrence Baum examines the major issues in the debates over how best to understand judicial behavior and assesses what we actually know about how judges decide cases. He concludes that we are far from u…
Specialization and Authority Acceptance
Research on organizational behavior suggests that the authority of higher officials for their subordinates is relatively low for subordinates whose work is highly specialized. If this proposition is valid, the Supreme Court should have more limited authority for specialized federal courts than for their generalist counterparts. To test this expectation, citations to the Court's deci sions in patent law were analyzed. It was posited that the forme…
What Judges Want
Political scientists in the field of judicial politics' devote the largest portion of their collective effort to the explanation of judicial behavior They have made considerable progress, yet scholars in the field often express disappointment about our limited understanding of judicial behavior That disappointment is reasonable, in that we are far from fully comprehending the forces that shape what judges do. But students of judicial behavior hav…
Case Selection and Decisionmaking in the U.S. Supreme Court
L'A. analyse l'ouvrage de H.W. Perry « Deciding to decide: Agenda setting in the United States Supreme Court », ouvrage portant sur la jurisprudence a la Cour Supreme aux Etats-Unis. L'A. s'attarde plus precisement sur les buts politiques et legaux lors de la prise de decision judiciaire
On the Unpredictability of the Supreme Court
The United States Supreme Court today is an object of intense speculation. After two decades of anticipation by Court watchers, the Court may be ready to enter a new era in its history. Commentators debate what the new era will look like, if it does indeed develop. Will the Court reject altogether its mission of protecting individual liberties? If so, what new role will it adopt? Because the Supreme Court is an important and intriguing institutio…
Books in review
Membership Change and Collective Voting Change in the United States Supreme Court
Scholars and other observers of the Supreme Court generally perceive that change in the Court's membership is the primary source of change in its policies and decisional patterns. This article is an effort to test that perception by examining the sources of collective voting change in civil liberties decisions during the 1946-1985 terms of the Court. Focusing on periods of significant change in collective voting behavior during this era, the anal…
"New-Style" Judicial Campaigns and the Voters
Patterns and Sources of Ticket Splitting in Subpresidential Voting
The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a "new" (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too …
Workload Influences on Supreme Court Case Acceptance Rates, 1975-1984
Patterns of Adoption of Tort Law Innovations
Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativen…
Measuring Policy Change in the U.S. Supreme Court
Measuring the U.S. Supreme Court's policy changes is complicated by change in the content of the cases that come before the Court. I adapt from earlier scholarship a method to correct for changes in case content and use this method to measure change in the Court's support for civil liberties in the 1946–85 terms. Analysis based on this method indicates that because of changes in case content, the average difficulty of reaching a pro-civil liberti…
Patterns and Sources of Ticket Splitting in Subpresidential Voting
The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a "new" (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too …
Ballot Information and Voting Decisions in Judicial Elections
Ballots used in the American states differ in the information that they provide about candidates. This article examines the effects of ballot information on voters' decisions whether and how to vote in individual contests, effects on which scholars have not yet provided direct evidence. The study employs experimental manipulations within pre-election and post-election surveys on three contests for seats on a state supreme court. Ballot informatio…
Policy Goals in Judicial Gatekeeping
Membership Change and Collective Voting Change in the United States Supreme Court
Scholars and other observers of the Supreme Court generally perceive that change in the Court's membership is the primary source of change in its policies and decisional patterns. This article is an effort to test that perception by examining the sources of collective voting change in civil liberties decisions during the 1946-1985 terms of the Court. Focusing on periods of significant change in collective voting behavior during this era, the anal…
Inviting Congressional Action
Theory: The Supreme Court's occasional to Congress to reverse the Court's statutory decisions challenge two influential theories of the Court's behavior and thus merit attention. Hypotheses: Three altemative explanations for invitations are posited: low interest in certain cases on the part of the justices, a desire to maintain the Court's institutional standing, and a desire to achieve both good policy and good law. Methods: These altemative exp…
What Judges Want
Political scientists in the field of judicial politics' devote the largest portion of their collective effort to the explanation of judicial behavior They have made considerable progress, yet scholars in the field often express disappointment about our limited understanding of judicial behavior That disappointment is reasonable, in that we are far from fully comprehending the forces that shape what judges do. But students of judicial behavior hav…
"New-Style" Judicial Campaigns and the Voters
The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U.S. State Court Judgeships
Over the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U.S. states have become larger in scale. We analyze the impact of this development on voters' choices between candidates. Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting. We find that…
Explaining the Vote in Judicial Elections
rT ^HE MERITS of alternative systems for selection of state judges have been the subject of debate throughout American history (Dubois 1980: ch. 1). That debate continues today, focusing on the choice between the traditional systems of election and gubernatorial appointment and the twentieth-century innovation of the Missouri Plan, under which the governor appoints judges from a list of commission nominees. In recent years, the debate over state …
Thesupremecourt Inamericanpolitics
The Supreme Court's role in American politics is a product of its interventions in public policy making and the impact of those interventions on government and society. The Court's frequent and substantial interventions during the past half century are especially striking, and their extent and their beneficiaries cannot be explained fully by major theories of the Court's behavior. The Court's rulings often receive negative responses from other po…
Selection of Law Clerks and Polarization in the U.S. Supreme Court
Scholars have pointed to signs of growing polarization in American politics along partisan and ideological lines. This article probes for polarization in the Supreme Court by examining the role of ideological considerations in the selection of law clerks. For the 1975-1998 terms of the Court, we analyzed the relationship between the justices' ideological positions and the positions of the lower court judges from whom the justices drew their clerk…
Comparing the Policy Positions of Supreme Court Justices from Different Periods
T HHE small size of the Supreme Court creates a number of difficulties for analysis of decision making on the Court. One of these difficulties concerns explanation of differences among justices in their voting behavior. The membership of 435 in the House of Representatives allows sophisticated analysis of characteristics associated with individual voting behavior. In contrast, the Supreme Court's membership of 9 largely precludes even the most el…
The Evolution of Litigation in the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1895-1975
This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935…
Judicial Specialization, Litigant Influence, and Substantive Policy
Several courts of limited jurisdiction currently exist in the federal judicial system, and new specialized courts have been proposed. Opponents of some specialized courts have pointed to the potential policy implications of judicial specialization, and their arguments merit attention. In this article the effects of specialization on the influence of litigant groups over judicial decisions and on the substance of judicial policy are analyzed in ge…
Case Selection and Decisionmaking in the U.S. Supreme Court
L'A. analyse l'ouvrage de H.W. Perry « Deciding to decide: Agenda setting in the United States Supreme Court », ouvrage portant sur la jurisprudence a la Cour Supreme aux Etats-Unis. L'A. s'attarde plus precisement sur les buts politiques et legaux lors de la prise de decision judiciaire
Information and party voting in ?semipartisan? judicial elections
Research on the English Judicial Process
This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the En…
Specialization and Authority Acceptance
Research on organizational behavior suggests that the authority of higher officials for their subordinates is relatively low for subordinates whose work is highly specialized. If this proposition is valid, the Supreme Court should have more limited authority for specialized federal courts than for their generalist counterparts. To test this expectation, citations to the Court's deci sions in patent law were analyzed. It was posited that the forme…
Responses of Federal District Judges to Court of Appeals Policies
Linking Issues to Ideology in the Supreme Court
This article probes explanations for the linkages between Supreme Court justices’ broad ideological stances and their positions in specific issue areas. The justices’ votes in decisions on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment showed no consistent ideological pattern in the 1937–79 terms but have fallen along clear ideological lines since then. Analysis of relevant evidence indicates that this shift reflected both changes in the content of ta…
Responses of Federal District Judges to Court of Appeals Policies
EPMPIRICAL research on the implementation of judicial policies has contributed substantially to our understanding of the American judicial process. But its contributions are limited by the narrowness of its focus. Typically, studies have examined response to single dramatic decisions of the Supreme Court on constitutional civil liberties issues. Few studies examine response to policies made by courts other than the Supreme Court, non-civil libert…
The Influence of Legislatures and Appellate Courts Over the Policy Implementation Process
Supreme Court Elections
This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts. 1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that h…
Specific and Diffuse Interests in Patent Policy
Policy Goals in Judicial Gatekeeping
Research on the English Judicial Process
This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the En…
Judicial Specialization, Litigant Influence, and Substantive Policy
Several courts of limited jurisdiction currently exist in the federal judicial system, and new specialized courts have been proposed. Opponents of some specialized courts have pointed to the potential policy implications of judicial specialization, and their arguments merit attention. In this article the effects of specialization on the influence of litigant groups over judicial decisions and on the substance of judicial policy are analyzed in ge…
Police Response to Appellate Court Decisions
Responses of Federal District Judges to Court of Appeals Policies
EPMPIRICAL research on the implementation of judicial policies has contributed substantially to our understanding of the American judicial process. But its contributions are limited by the narrowness of its focus. Typically, studies have examined response to single dramatic decisions of the Supreme Court on constitutional civil liberties issues. Few studies examine response to policies made by courts other than the Supreme Court, non-civil libert…
Responses of Federal District Judges to Court of Appeals Policies
The Influence of Legislatures and Appellate Courts Over the Policy Implementation Process
Patterns of Adoption of Tort Law Innovations
Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativen…
The Evolution of Litigation in the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1895-1975
This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935…
Explaining the Burger Court's Support for Civil Liberties
For eighteen years, Supreme Court watchers have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s, the Court expanded legal protections for civil liberties far more than it had in any previous period. After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, many observers expected that his appointments would move the Court away from its commitment to civil liberties. When Nixon was able to appoint four new justices i…
Information and party voting in ?semipartisan? judicial elections
Explaining the Vote in Judicial Elections
rT ^HE MERITS of alternative systems for selection of state judges have been the subject of debate throughout American history (Dubois 1980: ch. 1). That debate continues today, focusing on the choice between the traditional systems of election and gubernatorial appointment and the twentieth-century innovation of the Missouri Plan, under which the governor appoints judges from a list of commission nominees. In recent years, the debate over state …
Comment on Daniels
Stephen Daniels' essay examines the series of studies of state supreme courts by Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, Robert A. Kagan, and Stanton Wheeler, studies that report the results of what I will call the State Supreme Court Project. In this comment, I will not focus on the critique that Daniels makes of these studies; rather, I will consider a broader set of issues that his essay and the articles that he discusses raised for me.
Measuring Policy Change in the U.S. Supreme Court
Measuring the U.S. Supreme Court's policy changes is complicated by change in the content of the cases that come before the Court. I adapt from earlier scholarship a method to correct for changes in case content and use this method to measure change in the Court's support for civil liberties in the 1946–85 terms. Analysis based on this method indicates that because of changes in case content, the average difficulty of reaching a pro-civil liberti…
Comparing the Policy Positions of Supreme Court Justices from Different Periods
T HHE small size of the Supreme Court creates a number of difficulties for analysis of decision making on the Court. One of these difficulties concerns explanation of differences among justices in their voting behavior. The membership of 435 in the House of Representatives allows sophisticated analysis of characteristics associated with individual voting behavior. In contrast, the Supreme Court's membership of 9 largely precludes even the most el…
Workload Influences on Supreme Court Case Acceptance Rates, 1975-1984
On the Unpredictability of the Supreme Court
The United States Supreme Court today is an object of intense speculation. After two decades of anticipation by Court watchers, the Court may be ready to enter a new era in its history. Commentators debate what the new era will look like, if it does indeed develop. Will the Court reject altogether its mission of protecting individual liberties? If so, what new role will it adopt? Because the Supreme Court is an important and intriguing institutio…
Books in review
Membership Change and Collective Voting Change in the United States Supreme Court
Scholars and other observers of the Supreme Court generally perceive that change in the Court's membership is the primary source of change in its policies and decisional patterns. This article is an effort to test that perception by examining the sources of collective voting change in civil liberties decisions during the 1946-1985 terms of the Court. Focusing on periods of significant change in collective voting behavior during this era, the anal…
"New-Style" Judicial Campaigns and the Voters
Patterns and Sources of Ticket Splitting in Subpresidential Voting
The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a "new" (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too …
Case Selection and Decisionmaking in the U.S. Supreme Court
L'A. analyse l'ouvrage de H.W. Perry « Deciding to decide: Agenda setting in the United States Supreme Court », ouvrage portant sur la jurisprudence a la Cour Supreme aux Etats-Unis. L'A. s'attarde plus precisement sur les buts politiques et legaux lors de la prise de decision judiciaire
Specialization and Authority Acceptance
Research on organizational behavior suggests that the authority of higher officials for their subordinates is relatively low for subordinates whose work is highly specialized. If this proposition is valid, the Supreme Court should have more limited authority for specialized federal courts than for their generalist counterparts. To test this expectation, citations to the Court's deci sions in patent law were analyzed. It was posited that the forme…
What Judges Want
Political scientists in the field of judicial politics' devote the largest portion of their collective effort to the explanation of judicial behavior They have made considerable progress, yet scholars in the field often express disappointment about our limited understanding of judicial behavior That disappointment is reasonable, in that we are far from fully comprehending the forces that shape what judges do. But students of judicial behavior hav…
Political science (36 works) · Law (35 works) · Law (26 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (25 works) · Politics (20 works) · Supreme court (20 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (17 works) · Law and economics (11 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)