This paper tests the hypothesis that financially and organizationally stronger parties tend to prevail in litigation against weaker parties, either because the normative structure of the American legal system has favored "the haves," or because judges' attitudes do, or because stronger parties have strategic and representational advantages in litigation. The study is based on a sample of 5,904 cases from sixteen state supreme courts, 1870-1970. According to our data, stronger parties, especially larger governmental units, did tend to achieve an advantage over weaker parties, but the advantage generally was rather small. The stronger parties' edge recurs in subsamples for different types of cases, time periods, and types of legal representation. It is attributed in part to the greater litigational capabilities of stronger parties. The idea that parties with more power, status, or resources have advantages in litigation and adjudication is hardly new, but it has received renewed attention in the last decade. The proposition is one of the cornerstones of Black's (1976) propositions about the behavior of law, and it lies at the heart of Galanter's analysis of "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead" (1974). Galanter's essay describes why parties with greater resources, usually "repeat players" in the legal system, might tend to win, and it has stimulated further research on the outcomes of court cases (Galanter, 1975).
Appellate court opinions, carefully indexed and preserved in law libraries, are a tremendous resource for historians and social scientists. In the theory of the common law, these opinions are the law; they stand in the center of the legal system. Their power is enhanced by the common law doctrine that links them in a chain of influence and causation-the doctrine of precedent. Their precedential value means that they are also powerful resources for the practicing lawyer-often the basic material with which he works. But these appellate opinions also are crucial documents for any study ofjudicial culture. The reasoning of the judges, over the years, reveals judges' notions of law and of the judicial role; it is an essential window into the legal culture of the judges. The style of opinions is as good an indicator as we have of what counts as sound legal reasoning for any given era. Even objective aspects of judicial opinions can be revealing, as Merryman's studies of California citation since 1950 and Goutal's work on opinion length show.' Moreover, a more policy-oriented conception of the judicial role arguably could be re-* Work on this article was supported by NSF Grant No.
The past century has seen a striking variation in the size of state supreme courts' caseloads-the number of appeals they hear and opinions they write. Some courts' issued 500 opinions or more in a single year; others wrote fewer than 100. A single court's caseload sometimes doubled from one decade to the next and then declined again. This Article reports the findings of our research on how caseload size affected the structure and business of American state supreme courts from 1870 to 1970.2 These findings derive from a study of state supreme courts, as revealed by selected quantitative measures. We have asked: How many cases did these courts decide? And what kinds? What types of litigants did they serve? How did their work change over the years? How did it differ from state to state? What do the changes suggest about the direction of state supreme court development and about the causal links between social conditions and legal change?
An apparent contradiction in the way to code dummy variables between Cohen (1968) and Overall and Spiegel (1969) led to the discovery of a general formula for coding dummy variables. The formula is based on demonstrating a theoretical connection between multiple comparison and dummy multiple regression. Examples are given for various cases of orthogonal and nonorthogonal designs, which explicitly include assumptions about sample size.
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