Reevaluating the Implications of Decision-Making Models

Masood, Ali S.; Songer, Donald R.

doi:10.1086/670745

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Scholars posit that at the top of the judicial hierarchy, justices focus on furthering their policy goals throughout the decision-making process (Masood and Songer 2013;Segal and Spaeth 2002). Conversely, judges at lower levels of the judiciary (i.e., trial courts) are not usually seen as attempting to further their policy goals but instead focus on routine and procedural norms of civil and criminal cases (Zorn and Bowie 2010).…”

Section: Navigating the Landscape Of Comparative Judicial Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Masood

Bowie

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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Given their place within the judicial hierarchy, judges on lower courts face a complex array of challenges including heavy caseloads, mandatory dockets, and the threat of Supreme Court reversal. Despite the extensive scholarship on the American courts, little is known about judicial interactions in comparative contexts. We articulate and evaluate a framework for lower court adherence to Supreme Court precedents by leveraging a cross-national design in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with similar systems but meaningful institutional variability. We find that the mechanisms promulgating adherence to Supreme Court precedents do not substantially vary across design or institutional context. Instead, our results demonstrate that legal factors exert a consistent, homogeneous effect on lower court compliance across judicial systems. Our work offers new and important implications for studies on law and courts and comparative institutions, more broadly.

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Section: Navigating the Landscape Of Comparative Judicial Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Masood

Bowie

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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“…On one side, our paper is related to the research on judge ideology, which is focused on the positioning judges, mostly for the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g. Giles et al, 2001;Epstein and Segal, 2005;Epstein et al, 2012;Johnson et al, 2011;Kassow et al, 2012;Martin and Quinn, 2001;Masood and Songer, 2013;Ginn et al, 2015;Sturm and Pritchett, 2006;Randazzo et al, 2010;Reid and Randazzo, 2016).…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Text classification of ideological direction in judicial opinions

Hausladen

Schubert

Ash

2020

International Review of Law and Economics

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a b s t r a c tThis paper draws on machine learning methods for text classification to predict the ideological direction of decisions from the associated text. Using a 5% hand-coded sample of cases from U.S. Circuit Courts, we explore and evaluate a variety of machine classifiers to predict "conservative decision" or "liberal decision" in held-out data. Our best classifier is highly predictive (F1 = .65) and allows us to extrapolate ideological direction to the full sample. We then use these predictions to replicate and extend Landes and Posner's (2009) analysis of how the party of the nominating president influences circuit judge's votes. (C.I. Hausladen). 1 The original, as well as the extended versions, are available at songerproject.org. vectorizer calculates the distance based on the "l2"-norm. It also makes uses the three additional features of year, circuit and case type. The regularization strength parameter ˛ for the Ridge classifier is 2.0. 9 The cases categorized as "mixed" or "other" are excluded.

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The Aggregate Dynamics of Lower Court Responses to the US Supreme Court

2019

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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 Court decision when the justices explicitly direct a lower court to consider a formally argued decision in its summary decisions. Our results demonstrate that such signals significantly increase the frequency with which the lower courts adopt the precedents of the US Supreme Court. We corroborate the causality of these links through qualitative analyses, distance matching methods, and simultaneous sensitivity analysis. Our study offers new and important insights on judicial impact and decision-making behavior in the American courts.

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Reevaluating the Implications of Decision-Making Models

Cited by 5 publications

References 26 publications

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Text classification of ideological direction in judicial opinions

The Aggregate Dynamics of Lower Court Responses to the US Supreme Court

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