The Influence of Law in the Supreme Court’s Search-and-Seizure Jurisprudence

Kritzer, Herbert M.; Richards, Mark J.

doi:10.1177/1532673x04264987

Cited by 69 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(31 reference statements)

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“…In an important series of papers, Kritzer and Richards use fact weights to test their theory that the influence of law within the Supreme Court can be found in the form of “jurisprudential regimes” (Richards & Kritzer 2002; Kritzer & Richards 2003, 2005). These regimes “structure Supreme Court decision making by establishing which case factors are relevant for decision making and/or by setting the level of scrutiny or balancing the justices are to employ in assessing case factors (i.e.…”

Section: Cases Facts and Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics

Kastellec

Lax

2008

J Empirical Legal Studies

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One complication in studying the Supreme Court and the judicial hierarchy is that the Court's docket is now nearly completely discretionary. Although the Justices’ strategies in picking cases affect the observations we make and the inferences we draw, this is rarely taken into account in studies of judicial politics. In this article, we study how case selection can affect our inferences within judicial politics, including those about decision making in the Supreme Court itself (such as whether law constrains the Justices) and throughout the judicial hierarchy (such as whether lower courts comply with Supreme Court doctrine). We use simulation analysis to show that the inferential problems raised by the Court's case selection range from moderate to severe. At stake are substantive conclusions within some of the most important and controversial debates in judicial politics.

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Section: Cases Facts and Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics

Kastellec

Lax

2008

J Empirical Legal Studies

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“…The measure combines aspects of legal precedent and case difficulty. It combines elements of the concepts of policy change developed by Wahlbeck (1997), the jurisprudential regimes of Richards and Kritzer (2002; Kritzer and Richards 2003, 2005), and Sunstein's (1999) minimalism and maximalism. A jurisprudential regime is defined as “a key precedent, or a set of related precedents, that structures the way in which Supreme Court justices evaluate key elements of cases in arriving at decisions in a particular legal area” (Richards and Kritzer 2002, 308).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jurisprudential regimes highlight the relevant facts that justices consider when deciding a case. But whereas the measures of case facts and jurisprudential regimes are confined to a single issue, such as free speech (Richards and Kritzer 2002), freedom of religion (Ignagni 1993, 1994; Kritzer and Richards 2003), or search and seizure (Kritzer and Richards 2005; Segal 1984, 1986), the issue evolution measure permits comparisons across policy areas. Thus, if two cases at the same stage of development arrive on the docket in different areas, the dynamics and the behavioral expectations of these cases should be similar.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“An Informal and Limited Alliance”: The President and the Supreme Court

2008

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Presidential influence transcends some of the barriers imposed by the separation of powers to influence decision making by the Supreme Court. Specifically, we test Robert Scigliano's proposition that an informal and limited alliance exists between the president and the Court. The analysis utilizes Supreme Court decisions on civil rights and civil liberties cases from 1953 to 2000 to assess the effects of the presidency, Congress, judicial policy preferences, and legal factors on the Court. The findings demonstrate that presidential ideology influences Court decisions, while the effects of Congress are more conditional and limited. The results provide support for Scigliano's notion of an informal alliance.

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“…In our article on search and seizure cases (Kritzer and Richards 2005), we had hypothesized significant before/after differences for seven individual variables and had found support for six of those hypotheses, regardless of personnel change. Employing the randomization test, Lax and Rader found no evidence that differences in any of these variables were significant.…”

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confidence: 89%

Taking and Testing Jurisprudential Regimes Seriously: A Response to Lax and Rader

Kritzer

Richards²

2010

The Journal of Politics

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Lax and Rader critique our use of the Chow test in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes on the grounds that individual justices votes are not statistically independent, which constitutes a violation of assumptions underlying the Chow test. In this response we point out that the Chow tests constituted only one part of our analysis; we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to look at the strength of the Chow tests compared to other sequential splits. Most importantly, we required that the observed statistical patterns of change be theoretically consistent with the legal changes made by the regime changing decisions; we note two areas where we did preliminary analyses that produced statistically significant results, but where those results did not make sense in light of the jurisprudence. We repeat both our Chow tests and individual interaction tests taking into account the clustering of observations. Our reanalysis provides support for some, but not all, of our original results. J ust as there has been careful examination of the underpinnings of the attitudinal model, it is fitting that our work on the relevance of law in Supreme Court decision making be subject to close reexamination. We welcome the analysis undertaken by Lax and Rader and appreciate having the opportunity to respond. 1 The authors have reanalyzed three of the four data sets in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes with an eye to assessing whether one element of the analysis we conducted, the Chow tests, might have led us to be overconfident in the conclusions that we drew regarding whether the structure of decision making by Supreme Court justices changed in a way consistent with jurisprudential regimes. 2 The thrust of their argument is that because of nonindependence among the votes of the individual justices in the individual cases, the statistical assumptions required for the Chow test are not met, and that a randomization methodology provides a more accurate basis of inference.Lax and Rader focus on only one element of what we did: the Chow tests. As they note, our analysis had three separate components: an assessment of whether the patterns of difference we observed made theoretical sense, the Chow tests, and a comparison of the statistical test for the theoretical break to other alternative breaks (sensitivity analysis). What was perhaps not clear in our presentation is the importance of the first step, which we detail below. The Chow test comparing the two time periods is by no means the definitive element of our examination of whether Supreme Court justices' decisions in an area of law could be characterized as being structured by a jurisprudential regime because many other splits would approximate our hypothesized split. It was not surprising to see statistical differences in the authors' ''odd experiment.'' Various splits could be statistically significant, even without a basis in theory. This was why we conducted the sensitivity analysis to see whether the split we hypothesized was among the strongest sequ...

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The Influence of Law in the Supreme Court’s Search-and-Seizure Jurisprudence

Cited by 69 publications

References 16 publications

Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics

Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics

“An Informal and Limited Alliance”: The President and the Supreme Court

Taking and Testing Jurisprudential Regimes Seriously: A Response to Lax and Rader

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