Designing Tests of the Supreme Court and the Separation of Powers

Sala, Brian R.; Spriggs, James F.

doi:10.2307/3219864

Cited by 34 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus, there are many ways in which Congress and the president can exert influence over the federal judiciary. This has led many scholars to test the separation of powers (SOP) model, which holds that judges are constrained in their decisions by the policy preferences of Congress and/or the president (see Bergara, Richman, and Spiller ; Cross and Nelson ; Ferejohn ; Spiller and Gely , finding support for the SOP model; but see Sala and Spriggs ; Segal , finding no support for the SOP model). While avoiding this debate, we do argue that the structural protections of the Constitution provide some degree of judicial independence to the federal judiciary.…”

Section: Judicial Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, these structural protections were intended to insulate judges from the political process and allow them to make decisions “without regard to the preferences of politically accountable officials” (Rosenberg , 371), and the assumption is that these provisions create an independent judiciary. To date, however, no one has empirically tested this assumption because most of the previous literature on the decision making of the federal judiciary examines the behavior of judges who already have Article III protections (see, e.g., Sala and Spriggs ; Bergara, Richman, and Spiller ; Cross and Nelson ; Ferejohn ; Segal ; Spiller and Gely ). Thus, previous studies have not been able to ascertain whether Article III does, in fact, provide judges with any degree of independence, instead assuming judicial independence exists and then proceeding to test under what conditions Article III judges are constrained.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are David Bazelon, H. Nathan Swaim, David Fahy, George T. Washington, William H. Hastie, John A. Danaher, Carroll Hincks, Leonard P. Moore, Griffin Bell, Walter P. Gewin, Paul Hays, Thurgood Marshall, Roger L. Gregory, and William H. Pryor. The ideology metric used for this analysis, the Poole Basic or Common Space (1998), does not provide ideology scores for presidents before Eisenhower, but we extended our analysis back to the late 1940s by using Truman's Senate score for his ideology as president (Sala and Spriggs ). Elmer Schnackenberg and Walter Bastian were excluded because their short recess periods (eighty‐four and seventy‐three days, respectively) did not produce any preconfirmation votes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Judicial Independence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Graves¹,

Howard²,

Corley³

2013

Law & Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we directly test the presence of judicial independence by examining judicial recess appointees who have later been confirmed by the Senate to full‐time Article III judicial positions. Specifically, we compare the votes of recess‐appointed courts of appeals judges during their temporary appointment tenure with a similar period following Senate confirmation. We find substantial differences in pre‐ and postconfirmation voting, suggesting that the structural protections of the Constitution provide judges a certain amount of independence.

show abstract

Section: Judicial Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Judicial Independence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Graves¹,

Howard²,

Corley³

2013

Law & Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…According to these scholars, if a justice perceives that by voting for her most preferred alternative she will create policy out of step with key policy makers, she will moderate her vote to make policy that is more favorable to them . Influence from the elected branches, they argue, forces the Court into majoritarian compliance (but see Owens ; Sala & Spriggs ; Segal ).…”

Section: Theorizing the Conditions Under Which Justices Write Clear Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not predict clarity in majority or concurring opinions. Third, all justices write clearer dissents than majority opinions, while minimum winning coalitions produce the clearest majority opinions. Fourth, justices across the board write clearer opinions in criminal procedure cases than in any other issue area. Finally, opinions that formally alter Court precedent render less clear law, potentially leading to a cycle of legal ambiguity.

show abstract

“…Second, the institutional structure of the Court's decisionmaking process serves to help set the agenda of each case before the justices come to conference to cast votes on the merits (see Sala & Spriggs 2004). In fact, the norm that discourages justices from deciding issues sua sponte (Epstein et al 1996) helps ensure that the Court will not entertain arguments not presented in written briefs or at oral argument.…”

Section: Sophisticated Voting and The Supreme Courtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Passing and Strategic Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

2005

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Analyzing strategic aspects of judicial decisionmaking is an important element in understanding how law develops. In this article, we examine sophisticated voting on the U.S. Supreme Court by empirically modeling justices' decisions to pass when it is their turn to vote during conference discussions. We argue that, due to the opinion assignment norm, the chief justice may pass when one of the key conditions necessary for sophisticated voting—certainty about the views held by other justices and the agenda—is lacking. By passing, the chief can view his colleagues' votes in order to determine which vote will allow him to assign the majority opinion and, ultimately, forward his policy preferences. Using data from Justice Lewis F. Powell's conference notes, we show that the chief passes for this purpose, and that doing so is an effective strategy. In addition, we show that the senior associate justice in a case, who has a nontrivial chance of assigning the majority opinion, also passes for strategic reasons. As we expect, the data indicate that the remaining associates seem not to pass for strategic purposes.

show abstract

Designing Tests of the Supreme Court and the Separation of Powers

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Judicial Independence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Judicial Independence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions

Passing and Strategic Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About