The Influence of Precedent on State Supreme Courts

Kassow, Benjamin J.; Songer, Donald R.; Fix, Michael P.

doi:10.1177/1065912910391477

Cited by 27 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(34 reference statements)

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“…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.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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, ). When a state high court finds itself in a position where it must address a question of federal law, that court is bound by the precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court.…”

Section: Readability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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). When a state high court finds itself in a position where it must address a question of federal law, that court is bound by the precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court.…”

Section: Readability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Fix

Fairbanks

2019

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective This article examines whether more readable U.S. Supreme Court opinions are cited with greater frequency in state courts of last resort. Methods We use random slope, random intercept multilevel models to analyze 30 years of state high court citations to U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions issued during the 1987–2006 terms. Results Our analysis reveals that opinion readability exerts a strong substantive impact on citation rates. This effect holds while accounting for a variety of factors previously shown to influence citation rates. Conclusion Institutional constraints, workload considerations, and audience costs should lead state high courts to find clearly written opinions more attractive than jargon‐laden ones. This makes the readability of a U.S. Supreme Court precedent a useful heuristic for state courts when selecting among potential relevant precedents. As these courts play a major role in implementing U.S Supreme Court decisions, our findings indicate that the readability of U.S. Supreme Court opinions has a strong effect on their long‐term impact.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Readability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Readability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Fix

Fairbanks

2019

Social Science 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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“…Although state supreme courts are studied considerably less than the U.S. Supreme Court, they exert considerable influence over their citizens' lives and state politics and policy and are worthy of scholarly consideration. For example, Kassow, Songer and Fix (2011) study how states supreme courts treat U.S. Supreme Court precedent, focusing on whether the Supreme Court's precedent was positive or negative. Hinkle (2015) analyzes federal appellate courts' impact on states' decision to adopt policies.…”

Section: Motivation For Precedentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connected courts

Matthews¹

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSMany people contributed to this project in tangible and intangible ways. First, thank you to my dissertation committee members, Tracy Osborn, Chuck Shipan, Julie Pacheco, and Elizabeth Menninga for taking the time to be a part of this project.This dissertation benefited greatly from your invaluable critiques and suggestions, and your advice helped me mature as a scholar. I cannot thank you enough. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Fred Boehmke, who not only reviewed drafts of this project but also provided much needed encouragement, motivation, and support throughout graduate school.I also thank my family, writing this dissertation would have been a seemingly impossible task without you. To my husband, Andy Rury, your patience knows no bounds. Thanks to you, I never have to regret not taking chances and for that, I will be eternally grateful. To my parents, Andy and Grace Matthews, thank you for supporting me during this long journey and not expecting me to be anything other than who I am. And thank you to my aunt, Lydia Matthews, for daring me to dream from an early age. You opened my eyes to a world beyond Iowa's borders; I would not be where I am today if we had not toured New England colleges together. ii ABSTRACT State supreme courts are autonomous institutions with significant power. Yet, despite this authority, state supreme courts routinely rely on one another to explain why and how they reached their decisions. This puzzle of why state supreme courts cite each other in their opinions led me to pose two questions. First, under what conditions do state supreme courts cite other states supreme courts? And second, to whom do they turn for guidance? To answer these questions, I propose a new theory for evaluating state supreme court citations, the social learning model. I borrow policy diffusion's learning mechanism and I pair it with network theory and methods to explain peer-to-peer state supreme court citations practices. I argue that courts are social actors who interact, influence, and learn from one another, and the citations are communications by and between the courts.To model citations between courts, I apply a temporal exponential random graph network analysis model or TERGM. TERGMs simulate the evolution of the state-to-state citation network by including aspects of both the courts and the network structure. I argue that only by understanding how networks and issue areas evolve can we begin to understand how courts and justices make decisions. The network approach to citations specifically tests these endogenous relationships, it also directly models the complex dependencies of citation networks.My findings demonstrate the courts became more connected over time and no single state supreme court leader emerges. I find that citations are endogenous; what iii one court does affects other courts. I also discover that the area of law matters a lot and it is insufficient to pool all legal issues into a single model. Finally, state supreme courts do not cite state supreme courts who ...

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The Influence of Precedent on State Supreme Courts

Cited by 27 publications

References 27 publications

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

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

Text classification of ideological direction in judicial opinions

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