State Supreme Courts: A Century of Style and Citation

Abstract

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 Prestige of Australian State Supreme Courts Over the 20th Century

“…In each decade, New South Wales and Victoria were the major cue-senders, whereas Tasmania and Western Australia were the main cuereceivers. Consistent with findings for the State supreme courts in the United States (see, for example, Friedman et al 1981;Merryman 1977), at first blush, it seems that the larger, more populous and industrialised States received more out of State citations than the smaller, less, populous and less industrialised States. This is an issue we address systematically in the next section.…”

“…One set of studies in the empirical legal literature examine the citation practice of the US State supreme courts. Some of these studies examine the citation practice of the State supreme courts in several States (see, for example, Friedman et al 1981), whereas others focus on the citation practice of the State supreme court or Court of Appeal in specific States, such as California and New York (see, for example, Manz 2001;Merryman 1977). Although the main focus of these studies is on considering general citation practices, these studies provide implicit rankings of State supreme courts based on prestige by ranking State supreme courts based on the number of interstate citations that they receive.…”

“…If we assume that courts prefer to rely on their own prior decisions whenever possible (Shapiro 1972), the more legal capital that a court has the less it will need to borrow the legal precedent of its sister courts and the more it will be cited by its sister courts which have few precedents of their own (Landes and Posner 1976). In studies for the State supreme courts in the United States, the State supreme courts which received the highest number of interstate citations, such as California and New York, also had more cases that could be cited (Friedman et al 1981).…”

“…This practice provides protection against arbitrary decision making. As Friedman et al (1981) put it, judges are expected to decide 'according to the law', which means 'they are not free to decide cases as they please, [but instead] are expected to invoke appropriate legal authority for their decisions.' Citations of previous authorities are therefore one way for judges to give their decisions legitimacy (Mondak 1990).…”

Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court

“…2 One can think of 1 We are not the first to examine the citation of precedent (or other legal authorities) as a means to understand the importance of courts, opinions, or judges (see, e.g., Merryman 1954Merryman , 1977Landes and Posner 1976;Friedman et al 1981;Caldeira 1985;Kosma 1998;Landes, Lessig, and Solimine 1998;Sirico 2000;Klein 2002;Chandler 2005;McIntosh et al 2005;Cross, Smith, and Tomarchio 2006). We thus follow in a long tradition of examining legal citations, but we show that recent advances in the methodology of network analysis lead to more nuanced and precise measures of the relevance of a case for the network of law.…”