James F. Spriggs

Amicus Curiae and the Role of Information at the Supreme Court

Conventional wisdom holds that amicus briefs provide the Supreme Court with information that is not otherwise supplied by litigants and that the Court finds this information useful. While several studies explore the information that amici contribute to the Court in certain notable cases, judicial scholars have no systematic knowledge regarding the nature of information furnished by amici or the Courts use of it in its opinions. We argue that amici curiae briefs are important because they reduce informa tion problems at the Court by helping the justices anticipate the impact of their opinions. To test conventional wisdom, we examined all party briefs on the merits and amicus briefs filed in the 1992 term. We found that the conventional wisdom is largely inaccurate. First, amicus briefs often con tribute unique arguments, but they also commonly reiterate their partys brief. Second, the Courts majority opinions are not more likely to use ar guments from amicus briefs that offer new information. In fact, the Court is much less likely to adopt arguments from amicus briefs that exclusively add arguments not found in their party briefs, even after controlling for a variety of alternative explanations. The implication is that amici influence is not a function of the independent information they convey

The Supreme Court and Federal Administrative Agencies: A Resource-Based Theory and Analysis of Judicial Impact

Theorv: Government bureaucracies are strategic and implement Supreme Court opinions based upon the costs and benefits of alternative policy choices. Agencies develop these expectations from prevailing resource environments and bureaucracies are more likely to establish larger policy change when resources favor the Court because the costs of not changing their policies appear larger. Hypotheses: The amount of bureaucratic policy change due to Court opinions is a function of: (1) attributes of Supreme Court opinions-specificity of Court-ordered policy change, basis of opinions, remands, and dissents; (2) agency characteristics-policy preferences, type of proceedings, and time preferences; and (3) external actors-amicus curiae, opposing litigants, Congress, and presidents. Methods: An Ordered Probit analysis tests a multivariate model of the impact of every Supreme Court opinion reversing or remanding a federal agency decision from the 1953 through 1990 terms. Results: Agency policy change after Court opinions is influenced by the specificity of Supreme Court opinions, agency policy preferences, agency age, and amicus curiae support.

Designing Tests of the Supreme Court and the Separation of Powers

While rational choice models of Supreme Court decisionmaking have enhanced our appreciation for the separation of powers built into the Madisonian Constitutional design, convincing empirical support for a Separation-of-Powers (SOP) constraint on justices’ behavior has been elusive. We apply a standard spatial voting model to identify circumstances in which Attitudinalist and SOP predictions about justices’ behavior diverge. Our reconsideration of the theory indicates that prior efforts to test quantitatively the two models have failed to select out cases for which the two models’ predictions do not differ. While our more focused test offers a fairer test of the SOP constraint, the results strongly reject the SOP model. Nonetheless, our analysis provides leverage on this issue by: (1) delineating and executing necessary research design protocols for crafting a critical test of the SOP model; and (2) rejecting the two exogenously fixed alternative SOP models and suggesting avenues for future research.

Calling It Quits: Strategic Retirement on the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1893-1991

Does politics influence judicial retirements? Judicial scholars have long ac knowledged the role of politics in the judicial appointment process and in judicial decision making, but the judicial retirement literature presents divergent conclusions on the effect of politics. We employ an event count model to test the influence of politics on the annual number of voluntary departures from the federal courts of appeals from 1893 through 1991. Our data provide evidence that more judges are likely to retire when politi cal conditions favor the selection of successors sharing their policy views or when unfavorable political conditions appear unlikely to change. These political factors are significant even after controlling for the costs incurred by continued service on the courts, such as diminishing salary, increasing caseload, age, and improved retirement benefits.

Explaining Federal Bureaucratic Compliance with Supreme Court Opinions

Past research on bureaucratic compliance with Supreme Court opin ions offers few comprehensive theoretical frameworks and even fewer rigorous empirical tests. I argue that bureaucracies comply based on the costs or benefits of alternative ways of responding to the Court. Agencies develop these expectations from the environments within which they implement opinions, which I conceptualize as attributes of Court opin ions, agency characteristics, and external actors. I show that federal bu reaucracies generally comply with the Court, though they sometimes respond to the Court in self-interested ways. Using a probit model of agency implementation of Court opinions from the 1953 through 1990 terms, I also demonstrate that several factors explain whether agencies comply, including the nature of the Courts opinions, the characteristics of the responding agency, and support by societal interests. I further il lustrate that the absence of defiance or evasion most likely results from the interdependencies between federal agencies and the Court. The im plication is that legal rules are important, setting up referents for behav ior, and their ability to encourage compliance stems in part from their actual content.

Marshalling the Court: Bargaining and Accommodation on the United States Supreme Court

Theory: Supreme Court opinion authors make strategic calculations about the need to craft opinions that are acceptable to their colleagues on the bench. Hypotheses: The willingness of justices to accommodate their colleagues depends upon the size and ideological makeup of the majority conference coalition and the number of suggestions and threats issued by their colleagues. These strategic considerations are important even after controlling for a series of nonstrategic factors, such as case complexity. Method: To examine the extent of accommodation in Supreme Court cases, we examine the number of draft opinions circulated by the majority opinion author. We use a Generalized Event Count model to determine whether strategic or nonstrategic efforts influence the amount of accommodation that occurs. Results: We show that accommodation is influenced strongly by strategic concerns-including the size of the majority conference coalition, the ideological distance of the author from the majority coalition, the ideological heterogeneity of the conference majority coalition, and the positions taken by majority coalition members and by nonstrategic factors, including the authors workload and the complexity of a case.

Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions

Scholars and judges commonly maintain that courts require institutional legitimacy in order to be an effective institution of government and that such legitimacy depends on judges making legally principled, neutral decisions. Two principal ways judges can signal the neutrality of decisions are the size of the majority coalition and the treatment of precedent: opinions with larger majorities or grounded in precedent project to the public that they were decided in accordance with the rule of law and thus based on impartial decision-making criteria. We use an experimental design to test whether these two decision attributes influence attitudes toward decisions, presenting individuals with mock newspaper articles reporting on Court decisions in which we systematically vary majority coalition size and treatment of precedent. Our data show that when the Court produces a unanimous (rather than divided) decisional coalition and when it follows (rather than overrules) precedent, individuals are more likely to agree with and accept a decision, even if they are ideologically predisposed to disagree with a given Court outcome.

Ghostwriters on the Court?: A Stylistic Analysis of U.S. Supreme Court Opinion Drafts

A common refrain among Supreme Court watchers is that today it is law clerks who are primarily responsible for drafting the justices’opinions. We search for traces of clerical drafting—identifiable stylistic “fingerprints”—in the first drafts of the opinions that two justices, Lewis F. Powell Jr., and Thurgood Marshall, circulated during the 1985 term of the Court. These two justices relied on their clerks to a different degree: Powell’s office procedures called for him and several clerks to participate in writing each opinion, whereas Marshall reputedly delegated most writing responsibilities to his clerks. We do detect the clerks’ distinct styles in the justices’ opinions, though; as expected, the fingerprints are clearer for Marshall’s clerks than for Powell’s. We also find differences across opinion type, with the clerks’unique style most easily discernible in separate opinions, as opposed to majority opinions.

The origin and development of stare decisis at the U.S. supreme court

Part I: Selecting Judges 1. Selecting Justice: Strategy and Uncertainty in Choosing Supreme Court Nominees Christine L. Nemacheck 2. The Role of Public Opinion in Supreme Court Confirmations Jonathan P. Kastellec, Jeffrey R. Lax, and Justin Phillips 3. Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decisions in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections Damon M. Cann, Chris W. Bonneau, and Brent D. Boyea Part II: Trial Courts 4. Race and Death Sentencing Isaac Unah and John Charles Boger 5. Under-Estimating and Over-Estimating Litigation: How Activist Plaintiffs May Advance Their Causes Even As They Lose Their Cases William Haltom and Michael McCann Part III: Appellate Courts 6. Patterns of Policy Making across State Supreme Courts Scott A. Comparato, Scott D. McClurg, and Shane A. Gleason 7. Decision Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals: The Determinants of Reversal on Appeal Virginia A. Hettinger and Stefanie A. Lindquist 8. Supreme Court Agenda Setting: Policy Uncertainty and Legal Considerations Ryan C. Black and Ryan J. Owens 9. The Origin and Development of Stare Decisis at the U.S. Supreme Court Timothy Johnson, James F. Spriggs, II, and Paul. J. Wahlbeck 10. Bargaining and Opinion Writing on the U.S. Supreme Court Tom S. Clark Part IV: Courts and Their Political Environments 11. Goldilocks and the Supreme Court: Understanding the Relationship between the Supreme Court, the President, and the Congress Michael A. Bailey and Forrest Maltzman 12. Interest Groups and Their Influence on Judicial Policy Paul M. Collins, Jr. 13. Public Opinion, Religion, and Constraints on Judicial Behavior Kevin T. McGuire Part V: Implementation and Impact 14. Lower Court Compliance with Precedent Sara C. Benesh and Wendy L. Martinek 15. Why Strict Scrutiny Requires Transparency: The Practical Effects of Bakke, Gratz, and Grutter Richard Sander

Why the Supreme Court Issues Plurality Opinions

Many of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the past 20 years have failed to produce a majority opinion of the Court. Examples abound, including such pathbreaking decisions as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and Rapanos v. United States. The reasons for the rise of plurality opinions are not well understood, either in the political science or legal literature. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first empirical study of why coalitions on the Supreme Court break down and, specifically, what factors contribute to the issuance of plurality opinions. The authors present the results of two empirical models. The first seeks to uncover the case-level determinants of plurality opinions using a universe of 5,711 cases from the United States Supreme Court Database. The authors measure three types of variables in the case-level model: (1) ideological factors such as the opinion author distance from the majority coalition and ideological heterogeneity of the coalition; (2) legal variables such as the classification of the case and whether it involves lower court conflict; and (3) contextual factors such as the number of amicus briefs filed and the number of issues involved in a case. Among other things, the authors find that cases involving constitutional interpretation are nearly 250% more likely to result in plurality opinions. Similarly, cases that are reargued or where the Court strikes a federal law as unconstitutional are also much more likely, on average, to result in plurality opinions. The second part of the model focuses on the influence of the independent variables on the actual choice that results in a plurality opinion - a Justices decision to concur in the judgment rather than join the majority, join the majority and concur, or dissent. Using a multinomial logit model, the authors apply the independent variables in the case-level model (plus several more) to a universe of 44,647 votes by Justices occurring between October Term 1953 and October Term 2006. The single greatest determinant of whether a Justice will write an opinion concurring in the judgment is a Justices distance from the author of the majority opinion. Significantly, many of the same variables studied in the authors case-level model are also statistically and substantively significant in the Justice-level model too.