The Complexities of State Court Compliance with U.S. Supreme Court Precedent

The Effect of Opinion Readability on the Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents in State High Courts

“…Thus, the effect is potentially damped by the high percentage of cases with zero citations. Additionally, while an increase of a single citation seems minimal even in these circumstances, we know from existing work that state high courts tend to rely more on U.S. Supreme Court cases that they have previously relied on, creating a sort of snowball effect (Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, 2017). Substantively, this is an important consideration.…”

“…To ensure that our results are not simply an artifact of measurement decisions related to our dependent variable, we reestimate our Standard Model to account for the highly skewed nature of the dependent variable, the difference between an increase in citation for a precedent that has never been cited compared to a precedent that already has over 100 citations is a very different thing. Moreover, we know that U.S. Supreme Court precedents that are cited by a state high court are more likely to be cited by that same court in the future (Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, ).…”

“…The unit of analysis is the state high court-U.S. Supreme Court precedent dyad. Because state high courts vary on a number of important dimensions that may impact their citation behavior generally and with respect to specific cases (Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, 2017;Kassow, Songer, and Fix, 2011), we measure the total number of citations to each U.S. Supreme Court precedent separately for each of the 52 state high courts. Specifically, our dependent variable is the total number of cases in which a given state high court makes at least one citation to a given U.S. Supreme Court precedent over the 1987-2017 time frame.…”

“…However, we depart from Nelson and Hinkle (2018) in terms of the scope of our study by focusing on citation patterns for all U.S. Supreme Court opinions by state high courts. State high courts, in contrast to lower federal courts, have significantly more flexibility in how they incorporate the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court into state law (Comparato and McClurg, 2007;Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, 2017;Hoekstra, 2005). This enhanced freedom means that their decision to use (or not use) a particular precedent is going to be influenced by a variety of factors related to the precedent.…”

“…This means that when state high courts are dealing with questions of state law only, they can treat U.S. Supreme Court precedents the same as decisions from their sister courts in other states: as influential but not binding. Additionally, even when a state high court confronts a case containing federal questions, it can still avoid these questions-and the related obligation to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent-when it can ground its decision in adequate and independent state grounds (Fix, Kingsland, and Montgomery, 2017). 3 Finally, state high courts care about the legal policy set by their opinions, and the choice of which precedents to rely on plays a significant role in shaping the policy content of an opinion (Kassow, Songer, and Fix, 2011).…”