Donald R Songer
Biographic Data
| ID | 971681 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donald R Songer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donald R |
| FAMILY NAME | Songer |
| SIGNATURE | SONGER D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Carolina |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1211 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
The Aggregate Dynamics of Lower Court Responses to the US Supreme Court
We argue that given finite resources to review the large number of lower court decisions, Supreme Court justices should primarily be interested in aggregate responses to their precedents. We offer a theory in which the US Supreme Court drives aggregate responses to its decisions by signaling the utility of its precedents to judges on the lower courts. Specifically, we argue that lower court judges have a greater propensity to rely on a Supreme Co…
Supreme Court Precedent in a Judicial Hierarchy
We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court’s use…
Party Capability and the US Courts of Appeals: Understanding Why the “Haves” Win
While many studies have examined party capability theory, few have empirically examined the potential causal mechanisms underlying the theory. We do this by combining quantitative analyses with qualitative data drawn from interviews with over 60 US courts of appeals judges. We find that the “haves,” or repeat players, hire better lawyers and that these lawyers independently contribute to the success of the repeat players. We also find that the ad…
The Politics of Judicial Retirement in Canada and the United Kingdom
In this study, we test theories of judicial retirement developed in the United States to study patterns of retirement in Canada and England. We explore whether there is evidence that justices time their departures to strategically advance partisan or policy goals. Using survival analysis to examine the career patterns of judges appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada (1875–2012), as well as the House of Lords of the United Kingdom (1875–2009), w…
Reevaluating the Implications of Decision-Making Models: The Role of Summary Decisions in US Supreme Court Analysis
Most empirical analyses of the US Supreme Court are limited to the Court’s plenary decisions. We contend that summary decisions are an important component of the total decisional output of the Court and, as such, should be included in any overall assessment of the decision making of the Court or its impact on the courts below. We analyze the universe of the Court’s summary decisions from 1995 to 2005. We assess the conventional wisdom that a cons…
The Influence of Precedent on State Supreme Courts
Studies of policy making by courts need to examine the actual policy adopted in the majority opinion rather than studying votes. The authors examine the responsiveness of state supreme courts to precedents announced by the US Supreme Court by examining their treatment of the precedents in their opinions, testing the utility of precedent vitality versus the impact of ideological preferences. They find that the vitality of Supreme Court precedent i…
The Support Structure and Sustained Attention to Rights: A Rejoinder
Explaining Changes to Rights Litigation: Testing a Multivariate Model in a Comparative Framework
Why do we witness variation in the level of judicial attention to rights litigation across countries and over time? Traditional explanations emphasize the constitutional recognition of rights, judicial leadership, and the development in society of a sophisticated “support structure for legal mobilization,” as key covariates of these phenomena. Yet, there is a dearth of quantitative empirical analyses that evaluate these explanations comparatively…
Judge Gender, Critical Mass, and Decision Making in the Appellate Courts of Canada
According to Justice Bertha Wilson, there is “overwhelming evidence that gender-based stereotypes are deeply embedded in the attitudes of many male judges ” and that “gender difference has been a significant factor in judicial decision-making”. Unfortunately, Justice Wilson’s observation has been subjected to few empirical tests. At the same time, scholarship suggests that in other contexts (e.g., legislatures), the presence of a “critical mass ”…
Explaining Dissent on the Supreme Court of Canada
While there is an extensive literature on the causes of dissensus on appellate courts in the US, few empirical studies exist of the causes of dissent in Canadian Supreme Court. The current study seeks to close that gap in the literature, proposing and then testing what we call a Canadian model of dissent. We find that the likelihood of dissent is strongly related to four broad factors that appear to exert independent influence on whether the Cour…
Assessing the Applicability of Strategic Theory to Explain Decision Making on the Courts of Appeals
The focus of this analysis is whether a strategic perspective provides a useful approach that enhances an understanding of broad patterns of judicial decision making on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The authors examine whether it is reasonable in the majority of cases for appeals court judges to modify their behavior when necessary to avoid reversal by the Supreme Court. This assessment utilizes statistical analyses and interviews from twenty-eight…
Ideological Consistency and Attitudinal Conf lict: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts
According to attitudinal theorists, justices on the U.S. Supreme Court decide cases largely on political preferences that fall within one dimension of ideology. The focus of this study is to test whether a unidimensional ideological model explains the voting behavior of Canadian Supreme Court justices (1992—1997). The factor-analytic results in three areas of law, two of which have never been examined in this way in Canada, provide substantial ev…
The Unanimous Decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada as a Test of the Attitudinal Model
Most of the empirical work on the decision making of justices on the Supreme Court of Canada has taken as its exclusive focus the divided decisions of the Court. In contrast to this extensive body of research on divided decision, the much more limited knowledge of unanimous decisions is troubling because such decisions constitute nearly three-quarters of all of the formal decisions of the Court. The analysis reported below provides a first step t…
Judicial Decision Making In the Supreme Court of Canada: Updating the Personal Attribute Model
This study seeks to add to the current understanding of the political nature of the Supreme Court of Canada. We analyze a data set consisting of all nonunanimous published Supreme Court decisions for the period 1949 to 2000. A prior study by Tate and Sittiwong (1989) suggested a model of judge attributes for the period 1949 to 1985. We build on that analysis by extending the time period to 2000, which allows the impact of gender also to be assess…
Taking It to the Next Level: The Elevation of District Court Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals
We address an important aspect of judicial careers: the elevation of judges from the U.S. District Courts to the Courts of Appeals. We argue that the likelihood of a judge being elevated is a function of informational cues and signals regarding the nature of the judge and the judge's compatibility with presidential preferences. We also expect norms involving the intersection between geography and Senate politics to affect a judge's elevation chan…
Supreme Court Auditing of the US Courts of Appeals: An Organizational Perspective
Using an aggregate-level model of Supreme Court–circuit court interactions, this study assesses the extent to which the Court's auditing process of circuit court outputs is shaped by organizational dynamics such as structural capacity, institutionalization, and demographic characteristics. Principals in organizational hierarchies must audit the behavior of their agents to ensure that the agents are faithfully complying with the principals' prefer…
The Effects of Information on the Accuracy of Presidential Assessments of Supreme Court Nominee Preferences
The Effects of Information on the Accuracy of Presidential Assessments of Supreme Court Nominee Preferences
Models of presidential success in the judicial appointment process assume that a president selects a nominee who will maximize his influence on the Court. The models assume that the president accurately assesses the preferences of potential nominees. We argue that these perceptions are subject to systematic errors. Specifically, the amount of information available to the evaluator (the president and his staff) of a Supreme Court nominee's policy …
The Timing of Presidential Nominations to the Lower Federal Courts
The Timing of Presidential Nominations to the Lower Federal Courts
Presidents often move quite slowly to exercise their important power of judicial appointment. This study attempts to explain these delays by developing a strategic conception of the timing of presidential nominations to the lower federal courts. We argue that the judicial selection process may be best conceptualized by viewing presidents as strategic actors who prefer to select judges with policy preferences that are as close as possible to those…
Presidential Success Through Appointments To The United States Courts Of Appeals
An enduring legacy for any president is achieved by appointing judges with similar policy preferences who then maintain those policy preferences during their tenure on the bench and long after leaving office. This process provides one of the few democratic checks on the judiciary. Some authors demonstrate that in the areas of social and economic policy, Supreme Court justices’ policy votes are concordant with their appointing presidents over time…
Appellate Court Supervision in the Federal Judiciary: A Hierarchical Perspective
In this article, we examine factors that influence appellate supervision in the lower tiers of the federal judicial hierarchy. Drawing on the insights of agency theory, we develop a framework to assess the determinants of circuit panel decisions to affirm or reverse federal district court rulings. Our analysis of U.S. Courts of Appeals' published civil rights decisions over a 29-year period (1971-1999) offers support for several hypothesized rela…
Assessing the Impact of Presidential and Home State Influences on Judicial Decisionmaking in the United States Courts of Appeals
Previous studies are in agreement that most appointments to the lower federal courts are the result of negotiations between the President and senators or other elites from the nominees' home state. There is also widespread agreement that the votes of lower court judges reflect, in part, the value preferences of the President who appointed them, and the state or region of their appointment. However, less is known about the relative influence of th…
The Influence of Presidential Versus Home State Senatorial Preferences on the Policy Output of Judges on the United States District Courts
While many of the decisions of federal district court judges involve the routine application of settled legal rules, a significant minority of their decisions present the judges with the opportunity to engage in judicial policy making. A considerable body of literature suggests that when faced with policy-making opportunities, the policy preferences of the judges exert a significant impact on the nature of those decisions. The present study explo…
Why the Haves Don't Always Come out Ahead: Repeat Players Meet Amici Curiae for the Disadvantaged
The Hierarchy of Justice: Testing a Principal-Agent Model of Supreme Court-Circuit Court Interactions
We examine Supreme Court-circuit court interactions from a principal-agent perspective, employing a fact pattern analysis to determine the extent to which circuit courts follow their own policy preferences versus the extent that they follow the policy dictates of the Supreme Court. We then examine whether monitoring by the Supreme Court can affect those interactions. We find that the courts of appeals are highly responsive to the changing search …
Ideology, Status, and The Differential Success of Direct Parties Before the Supreme Court
A substantial literature on lower federal courts and state courts suggests that the "haves" usually come out ahead in litigation because they possess superior resources for it and they reap advantages from their repeat player status. We investigate the success of 10 categories of litigants before the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts to determine whether the resources or experience of litigants has effects on Supreme Court outcomes paralleling…
Who Wins on Appeal? Upperdogs and Underdogs in the United States Courts of Appeals
The central focus of this investigation is the effect of litigation resources on the success of appellants appearing before the United States Courts of Appeals. The analysis parallels the earlier study by Wheeler et al. (1987) of who wins in state supreme courts. The findings are that litigation resources are much more strongly related to appellant success in the courts of appeals than in either the United States or state supreme courts. Upperdog…
Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court's Certiorari Decisions
We examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court, and its decision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own preferences, exploiting ambiguity in cases' fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from …
A Reappraisal of Diversification in the Federal Courts: Gender Effects in the Courts of Appeals
Prior scholarship on the effect of the increasing number of female judges leads to three contrasting sets of expectations. Early writings and views of affirmative-action activists suggested that female judges would be more liberal than male judges. On the other hand, a series of empirical studies suggest that we should expect no gender differences. In contrast to both of these perspectives, several feminist scholars suggest that women will be mor…
Integrating Alternative Approaches to the Study of Judicial Voting: Obscenity Cases in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
This analysis explored the relative impact of various influences on judges' votes in obscenity decisions of the United States Courts of Appeals. It builds upon previous studies that have examined separately the effects of political attitudes, case characteristics, nature of the parties, changing Supreme Court precedent, and defenses raised by litigants. When examined individually, 18 variables from these five approaches were related to a statisti…
Do the “Haves” Come Out Ahead over Time? Applying Galanter's Framework to Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 1925-1988
This investigation examines the success of various types of litigants appearing before the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1925 to 1988. The analysis parallels the earlier studies by Songer and Sheehan (1992) and Wheeler et al. (1987) that applied the core concepts introduced by Galanter's groundbreaking analysis of why the “haves” come out ahead to study litigant success on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and state courts of last resort. The findings sug…
Interest Group Success in the Courts: Amicus Participation in the Supreme Court
Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in the Supreme Court. Some cases studied suggest that these briefs may have a substantial effect on the Supreme Court's decisions, but no systematic studies have examined the efficacy of such briefs. The present study utilizes a precision matching strategy to determine if litigants supported by amici have a greater chance of success in the Suprem…
Consensual and Nonconsensual Decisions in Unanimous Opinions of the United States Courts of Appeals
to divided decisions. Unanimous decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals from two time periods separated by three decades were studied. Contrary to the widespread expectation that most unanimous decisions were truly consensual decisions whose outcomes were determined by precedent or other institutional/role restraints, a substantial proportion of the outcomes unanimous decisions both periods were found to reflect the ideological preferences of the…
The Impact of Party and Region on Voting Decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals, 1955-1986
nalysts of American political institutions have firmly established that party and region are important factors in voting behavior at both mass and elite levels of analysis. In this paper we examine the influence of party and region on the decisions of judges of the United States Courts of Appeals. Studies of voting patterns on the United States Supreme Court (Tate 1981), the federal district courts (Carp and Rowland 1983), and state appellate cou…
Concern for Policy Outputs as a Cue for Supreme Court Decisions on Certiorari
The Timing of Presidential Nominations to the Lower Federal Courts
Presidents often move quite slowly to exercise their important power of judicial appointment. This study attempts to explain these delays by developing a strategic conception of the timing of presidential nominations to the lower federal courts. We argue that the judicial selection process may be best conceptualized by viewing presidents as strategic actors who prefer to select judges with policy preferences that are as close as possible to those…
Assessing the Applicability of Strategic Theory to Explain Decision Making on the Courts of Appeals
The focus of this analysis is whether a strategic perspective provides a useful approach that enhances an understanding of broad patterns of judicial decision making on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The authors examine whether it is reasonable in the majority of cases for appeals court judges to modify their behavior when necessary to avoid reversal by the Supreme Court. This assessment utilizes statistical analyses and interviews from twenty-eight…
Not the Whole Story: The Impact of Justices' Values on Supreme Court Decision Making
A half century of empirical scholarship has now firmly established that the ideological values and the policy preferences of Supreme Court justices have a profound impact on their decisions in many cases. The prior work of Segal and Spaeth (both collaborative and independent) has made important contributions to our understanding of the linkages between these preferences and the justices' decisions (Rohde and Spaeth 1976; Segal 1984; Segal and Cov…
An Empirical Test of the Rational-Actor Theory of Litigation
This article examines the decisions of litigants in criminal cases to appeal decisions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Using a random sample of search and seizure cases from 1962 through 1990 and a measure of the likelihood that the appeals court decision will be reversed if cert is granted, we demonstrate that litigants behave as if they rationally consider costs and benefits in their decisions to appeal. Given the ext…
Appellate Court Supervision in the Federal Judiciary: A Hierarchical Perspective
In this article, we examine factors that influence appellate supervision in the lower tiers of the federal judicial hierarchy. Drawing on the insights of agency theory, we develop a framework to assess the determinants of circuit panel decisions to affirm or reverse federal district court rulings. Our analysis of U.S. Courts of Appeals' published civil rights decisions over a 29-year period (1971-1999) offers support for several hypothesized rela…
Supreme Court Impact on Compliance and Outcomes: Miranda and New York Times in the United States Courts of Appeals
Donald R. Songer, Reginald S. Sheehan, Supreme Court Impact on Compliance and Outcomes: Miranda and New York Times in the United States Courts of Appeals, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 297-316
Law and Politics in Judicial Oversight of Federal Administrative Agencies
Administrative agencies play a substantial role in the formulation and implementation of national policy. Central to this role is their exercise of discretion. A normative consensus exists that such dis-cretion should be constrained by administrative deference to the rule of law. The courts of appeals are expected to insure that such discretion is constrained. The analysis reported below examines how effectively they fulfill that expectation. The…
The Religious Right in Court: The Decision Making of Christian Evangelicals in State Supreme Courts
Much has been written recently about the emergence of evangelicals and others often labeled the "new Religious Right" in American politics However, little attention has been paid to whether officials who have been socialized in the denominations characterized as being part of this Religious Right actually behave differently in office from those brought up in other religious traditions. The present study begins such an inquiry by examining differe…
The Success of Amici in State Supreme Courts
During the past decade, interest group participation in state supreme courts has continued to increase, reflecting the increasing importance of these courts as policymakers in the federal system. Groups participate both as sponsors of litigation and as amici curiae, but little is known about either role. The present analysis explores the success of amici curiae in state supreme court decisions on the merits. Three methods of assessing the relatio…
The Impact of the Supreme Court on Trends in Economic Policy Making in the United States Courts of Appeals
Previous impact research has primarily investigated controversial civil liberties decisions. The present study examines the response of the United States Courts of Appeals to changes in the labor and antitrust policies announced by the Supreme Court between 1950 and 1977. Significant impact was discovered. In each policy area, the decisional trends of the courts of appeals underwent a significant change after each of two policy shifts on the Supr…
Why the Haves Don't Always Come Out Ahead: Repeat Players Meet Amici CCuriae for the Disadvantaged
The question of who wins and loses in American courts has traditionally been viewed as one of the central questions in the study of judicial politics. State supreme courts are particularly important in this regard since they are the final arbiters for the vast majority of litigation in the nation. In this article we examine the relationship between the status of litigants, especially the comparison of repeat player “haves” to oneshotters who are …
Judicial Decision Making In the Supreme Court of Canada: Updating the Personal Attribute Model
This study seeks to add to the current understanding of the political nature of the Supreme Court of Canada. We analyze a data set consisting of all nonunanimous published Supreme Court decisions for the period 1949 to 2000. A prior study by Tate and Sittiwong (1989) suggested a model of judge attributes for the period 1949 to 1985. We build on that analysis by extending the time period to 2000, which allows the impact of gender also to be assess…
Assessing the Impact of Presidential and Home State Influences on Judicial Decisionmaking in the United States Courts of Appeals
Previous studies are in agreement that most appointments to the lower federal courts are the result of negotiations between the President and senators or other elites from the nominees' home state. There is also widespread agreement that the votes of lower court judges reflect, in part, the value preferences of the President who appointed them, and the state or region of their appointment. However, less is known about the relative influence of th…
Government Closest to the People: Constituent Knowledge in State & National Politics
Concern for Policy Outputs as a Cue for Supreme Court Decisions on Certiorari
The Relevance of Policy Values for the Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
The confirmation votes on the fourteen most controversial Supreme Court nominees of the twentieth century were analyzed. The data supported the conclusion that Senate opposition to Supreme Court nominees is due primarily to a predicted dissatisfaction with the policy-relevant voting of the nominee after confirmation. The policy position of senators supporting confirmation was found to be significantly different from the policy position of senator…
Consensual and Nonconsensual Decisions in Unanimous Opinions of the United States Courts of Appeals
to divided decisions. Unanimous decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals from two time periods separated by three decades were studied. Contrary to the widespread expectation that most unanimous decisions were truly consensual decisions whose outcomes were determined by precedent or other institutional/role restraints, a substantial proportion of the outcomes unanimous decisions both periods were found to reflect the ideological preferences of the…
The Policy Consequences of Senate Involvement in the Selection of Judges in the United States Courts of Appeals
Donald R. Songer, The Policy Consequences of Senate Involvement in the Selection of Judges in the United States Courts of Appeals, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 107-119
Government Closest to the People: Constituent Knowledge in State & National Politics
The Influence of Issues On Choice of Voting Cues Utilized By State Legislators
Donald R. Songer, Sonja G. Dillon, Darla W. Kite, Patricia E. Jameson, James M. Underwood, William D. Underwood, The Influence of Issues on Choice of Voting Cues Utilized by State Legislators, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 118-125
The Impact of the Supreme Court on Trends in Economic Policy Making in the United States Courts of Appeals
Previous impact research has primarily investigated controversial civil liberties decisions. The present study examines the response of the United States Courts of Appeals to changes in the labor and antitrust policies announced by the Supreme Court between 1950 and 1977. Significant impact was discovered. In each policy area, the decisional trends of the courts of appeals underwent a significant change after each of two policy shifts on the Supr…
Nonpublication in the United States District Courts: Official Criteria Versus Inferences from Appellate Review
The Influence of Empirical Research: Committee vs. Floor Decision Making
Presidential Effects on Criminal Justice Policy in the Lower Federal Courts: The Reagan Judges
Scholarly and media accounts have portrayed the Reagan administration as strongly committed to the selection of judges who are ideologically in tune with the president. Interviews with key congressional participants indicate that Reagan has received substantial home-state support for his ideological selection criteria. These findings lead to the prediction that Reagan judges on the lower federal courts will be substantially less supportive of cri…
Case Selection in Judicial Impact Research
States Supreme Court decisions, while technically binding on the lower courts, do not automatically determine the outcomes of cases decided below. As a result, numerous studies assessing the impact of the Supreme Court have been published (see Wasby 1970; and Johnson and Canon 1984, for a summary and discussion of this literature). The accuracy and meaningfulness of the conclusions reached in these impact studies are of course dependent on the va…
Supreme Court Impact on Compliance and Outcomes: Miranda and New York Times in the United States Courts of Appeals
Donald R. Songer, Reginald S. Sheehan, Supreme Court Impact on Compliance and Outcomes: Miranda and New York Times in the United States Courts of Appeals, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 297-316
The Impact of Party and Region on Voting Decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals, 1955-1986
nalysts of American political institutions have firmly established that party and region are important factors in voting behavior at both mass and elite levels of analysis. In this paper we examine the influence of party and region on the decisions of judges of the United States Courts of Appeals. Studies of voting patterns on the United States Supreme Court (Tate 1981), the federal district courts (Carp and Rowland 1983), and state appellate cou…
The Impact of Major Structural Reform On Judicial Decisionmaking: A Case Study of the U.S. Fifth Circuit
The Impact of Major Structural Reform on Judicial Decisionmaking: A Case Study of the U. S. Fifth Circuit
Ronald Stidham, Robert A. Carp, Donald R. Songer, Donean Surratt, The Impact of Major Structural Reform on Judicial Decisionmaking: A Case Study of the U. S. Fifth Circuit, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 143-152
Integrating Alternative Approaches to the Study of Judicial Voting: Obscenity Cases in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
This analysis explored the relative impact of various influences on judges' votes in obscenity decisions of the United States Courts of Appeals. It builds upon previous studies that have examined separately the effects of political attitudes, case characteristics, nature of the parties, changing Supreme Court precedent, and defenses raised by litigants. When examined individually, 18 variables from these five approaches were related to a statisti…
Who Wins on Appeal? Upperdogs and Underdogs in the United States Courts of Appeals
The central focus of this investigation is the effect of litigation resources on the success of appellants appearing before the United States Courts of Appeals. The analysis parallels the earlier study by Wheeler et al. (1987) of who wins in state supreme courts. The findings are that litigation resources are much more strongly related to appellant success in the courts of appeals than in either the United States or state supreme courts. Upperdog…
Ideology, Status, and The Differential Success of Direct Parties Before the Supreme Court
A substantial literature on lower federal courts and state courts suggests that the "haves" usually come out ahead in litigation because they possess superior resources for it and they reap advantages from their repeat player status. We investigate the success of 10 categories of litigants before the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts to determine whether the resources or experience of litigants has effects on Supreme Court outcomes paralleling…
Interest Group Success in the Courts: Amicus Participation in the Supreme Court
Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in the Supreme Court. Some cases studied suggest that these briefs may have a substantial effect on the Supreme Court's decisions, but no systematic studies have examined the efficacy of such briefs. The present study utilizes a precision matching strategy to determine if litigants supported by amici have a greater chance of success in the Suprem…
A Reappraisal of Diversification in the Federal Courts: Gender Effects in the Courts of Appeals
Prior scholarship on the effect of the increasing number of female judges leads to three contrasting sets of expectations. Early writings and views of affirmative-action activists suggested that female judges would be more liberal than male judges. On the other hand, a series of empirical studies suggest that we should expect no gender differences. In contrast to both of these perspectives, several feminist scholars suggest that women will be mor…
The Hierarchy of Justice: Testing a Principal-Agent Model of Supreme Court-Circuit Court Interactions
We examine Supreme Court-circuit court interactions from a principal-agent perspective, employing a fact pattern analysis to determine the extent to which circuit courts follow their own policy preferences versus the extent that they follow the policy dictates of the Supreme Court. We then examine whether monitoring by the Supreme Court can affect those interactions. We find that the courts of appeals are highly responsive to the changing search …
An Empirical Test of the Rational-Actor Theory of Litigation
This article examines the decisions of litigants in criminal cases to appeal decisions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Using a random sample of search and seizure cases from 1962 through 1990 and a measure of the likelihood that the appeals court decision will be reversed if cert is granted, we demonstrate that litigants behave as if they rationally consider costs and benefits in their decisions to appeal. Given the ext…
The Success of Amici in State Supreme Courts
During the past decade, interest group participation in state supreme courts has continued to increase, reflecting the increasing importance of these courts as policymakers in the federal system. Groups participate both as sponsors of litigation and as amici curiae, but little is known about either role. The present analysis explores the success of amici curiae in state supreme court decisions on the merits. Three methods of assessing the relatio…
Not the Whole Story: The Impact of Justices' Values on Supreme Court Decision Making
A half century of empirical scholarship has now firmly established that the ideological values and the policy preferences of Supreme Court justices have a profound impact on their decisions in many cases. The prior work of Segal and Spaeth (both collaborative and independent) has made important contributions to our understanding of the linkages between these preferences and the justices' decisions (Rohde and Spaeth 1976; Segal 1984; Segal and Cov…
Do the “Haves” Come Out Ahead over Time? Applying Galanter's Framework to Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 1925-1988
This investigation examines the success of various types of litigants appearing before the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1925 to 1988. The analysis parallels the earlier studies by Songer and Sheehan (1992) and Wheeler et al. (1987) that applied the core concepts introduced by Galanter's groundbreaking analysis of why the “haves” come out ahead to study litigant success on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and state courts of last resort. The findings sug…
Political science (54 works) · Law (51 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (46 works) · Law (44 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (42 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (39 works) · Politics (36 works) · Supreme court (33 works) · Economics (16 works) · Law and economics (15 works)