Harold J. Spaeth

Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Revisited

Segal and Cover (1989) analyzed the content of newspaper editorials to devise measures of the ideological values of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because their measures came from sources independent of the judicial vote, scholars have widely adopted them. This note updates, backdates, and extends the Segal and Cover research by adding the two Bush appointees and the seven Roosevelt and four Truman nominees whose service extended beyond the start of the Vinson Court. While we find that the ideological values of the Eisenhower through Bush appointees correlate strongly with votes cast in economic and civil liberties cases, the results are less robust for justices appointed by Roosevelt and Truman.

The Influence of Stare Decisis on the Votes of United States Supreme Court Justices

Theory: We test arguments from the legal model claiming that United States Supreme Court justices will follow previously established legal rules even when they disagree with them; i.e., that they are influenced by stare decisis. Hypothesis: Because of the institutional features facing Supreme Court justices, we argue that justices who dissent from or otherwise disagree with Supreme Court precedents established in landmark cases are free not to support those decisions in subsequent cases. Methods: A systematic content analysis of the votes and opinions of dissenting Supreme Court justices in a random sample of landmark decisions and their progeny. Results: Overwhelmingly, Supreme Court justices are not influenced by landmark precedents with which they disagree. We replicate the research for nonlandmark decisions and find similar results. Alone among the justices studied, only Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell show any systematic support for stare decisis at all.

Do Political Preferences Change? A Longitudinal Study of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

Do the political preferences of U.S. Supreme Court justices change over time? Judicial specialists are virtually unanimous in their response: The occasional anomaly notwithstanding, most jurists evince consistent voting behavior over the course of their careers. Still, for all the research that presupposes the consistency of preferences, it is startling to find that scholars have yet to explore rigorously the assumption of stability. We fill this gap by describing the behavioral patterns of the 16 justices who sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for 10 or more terms, and began and completed their service some-time between the 1937 and 1993 terms. The data reveal that many experienced significant change over time-a result with important implications for virtually all longitudinal work on the Court.

Norms, Dragons, and Stare Decisis: A Response

Participants in this forum have raised a number of questions about our study examining the influence of stare decisis on the votes of United States Supreme Court justices. In response, we argue that (1) prominent scholars continue to accept various components of the legal model; (2) in testing the influence of precedent, we should and do examine votes and policy positions; and (3) we appropriately selected and evaluated our cases. Examining the original contributions of our critics, we argue that (1) precedent undoubtedly is a norm of Supreme Court behavior, but the mere citation of precedent does not mean that precedent automatically influences the justices in their policy positions; (2) cases cannot be selected on the dependent variable; and (3) summary reconsideration orders are inappropriate for inclusion in studies such as this. Finally, we reject the notion that attitudinal research subverts the body politic.

IDEOLOGICAL POSITION AS A VARIABLE IN THE AUTHORING OF DISSENTING OPINIONS ON THE WARREN AND BURGER COURTS

Investigation of dissenting opinions on the Warren and Burger courts in which all the justices in dissent joined the same dissenting opinion reveals that the justice in the extreme ideological position tends to write the dissenting opinion, but in the maximum losing coalitions the marginal justice (i.e., the justice ideologically closest to the majority) is equally likely to do so. These findings suggest that small group theory better explains dissenting opinion behavior than the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Increasing the Size of Minimum Winning Original Coalitions on the Warren Court

Clearly there may be resistance to unanimous decisions, e.g., Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 484 (1954), as well as those which are minimum winning. Because of this possible resistance, it may be advantageous for decisions and opinions of the Court to be decided by a large majority.2 Moreover, a minimum winning majority opinion is likely to result in an unstable precedent for the Court, which might be overturned if membership changes or if one of the justices in the majority changes his mind. Given the possible undesirability of minimum winning decisions and opinions, the majority opinion assigner might attempt to use his opinion assigning power to generate a final decision and an opinion that are larger than minimum winning. To understand how the size of the final decision or the opinion coalition can be enlarged, we describe the Courts opinion assignment proc-

Aggressive Grants by Affirm-Minded Justices

Given that the Supreme Court usually reverses the decision of the court below, why would justices who agree with that decision vote to hear the case? In other words, why would affirmminded justices vote to grant cert? Scholars refer to such behavior as the outcome prediction strategy. We examine its putative presence on the Vinson and Warren courts because valid and reliable data for these two courts exist. Our study has two purposes: (a) to identify and test the strategic and nonstrategic variables associated with granting cert by affirm-minded justices and (b) to offer evidence regarding whether the justices use outcome prediction. We find that although the well-known nonstrategic determinants of cert matter (e.g., salience and lower court conflict), so also do strategic considerations. We identify these variables and the strength of their impact on what fairly appears to be outcome-prediction voting by affirm-minded justices.

Access to the Federal Courts: An Analysis of Burger Court Policy Making

The issues of access to the federal courts and the policy implications of recent Supreme Court decisions have been the subject of much taxonomic and doctrinal analysis, particularly in light of the pattern of retrenchment and restriction that the Burger Court has displayed. This analysis attempts to ascertain what factors have motivated the Burger Court Justices in their policy choices. Through the use of cumulative scaling we find that none of our hypothesized influences explain the access choices of the Court as a whole. The Justices, rather, march to the beat of individualized drums-a varying admixture of administrative-legal influences, political attitudes, and/or an overall access attitude. Each Justices admixture is specified.

Influence Relationships Within the Supreme Court: a Comparison of the Warren and Burger Courts

IN ORDER to enhance understanding of the relationships among the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and to provoke a degree of conceptual and operational standardization within the judicial subfield, if not more broadly we operationalized the construct of influence in a previous paper (Altfeld and Spaeth 1984) and measured its effects on the justices who served during the first twelve years of the Burger Court (1969-1980). Our purpose here is to test further the utility of our measures by applying them in a comparative context: to the Warren, as well as the Burger, Court so that the dynamics of the relationships of all the Justices who served on these Courts may be specified and assessed.

Denial of Access and Ideological Preferences: an Analysis of the Voting Behavior of the Burger Court Justices, 1969-1976

the controversy. Stages one and two both concern &dquo;gatekeeping&dquo; activities. The first stage involves the grant or denial of certiorari and writs of appeal and is the subject of an extensive literature (e.g., Schubert, 1959; Provine, 1980; Teger and Kosinski, 1980; Baum, 1977; Ulmer, 1978; Ulmer et al., 1972; Tanenhaus et al., 1963). The second stage, which is the focus of our analysis, markedly differs from the first. Whereas stage one enables the Court to control its own docket by refusing to accept writs of certiorari and appeal, stage two involves cases that the Court has accepted for review. In this regard stage two is akin to stage three: both produce formal decisions complete with an opinion of the Court. Stage two differs from stage three, however, in that the former, as mentioned, does not address the substantive merits of the controversy. Because stage two does not resolve controversies on their merits, it serves as a second &dquo;gate&dquo; that litigants must pass through in order to secure resolution of their substantive contentions. Not only is this second &dquo;gate&dquo; distinguishable from the first stage by the presence of formal decisions, it also articulates the policy that is to guide the federal courts in their determination of what sorts of issues and what types of litigants may have their day in federal court. Whereas stage one enables the Court to control access only to its own docket, stage two establishes the policies that are to govern access to the lower federal courts as well as to the Supreme Court itself. Few empirical studies have considered stage two, notwithstanding its importance to an understanding of Supreme Court policy making. In one such analysis, we attempted to ascertain the factors that motivated each of