The Sum of its Parts: How Supreme Court Justices Disparately Shape Attention to Their Opinions

Masood, Ali S.; Kassow, Benjamin J.

doi:10.1111/ssqu.12775

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 53 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Studies on the American courts suggest that U.S. Supreme Court justices are vigorously attentive to the broader policy impact of their decisions (Masood and Kassow 2020;Segal and Spaeth 2002). This suggests that enterprising justices should be interested in maximizing the impact of their decisions on the policies adopted by the lower courts.…”

Section: A Theory On Higher and Lower Court Interactionsmentioning

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: A Theory On Higher and Lower Court Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Masood

Bowie

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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“…Ruger et al (2004), among others, provide empirical support for this claim by showing a relationship between ideology and judicial voting behavior. A number of factors at the time of setting precedent have been shown to influence subsequent treatment of a decision, including the characteristics of an opinion (Nelson and Hinkle 2018;Masood, Kassow, and Songer 2019) and the identity of the judges (Budziak 2017;Masood and Kassow 2020). It has also been argued that the content of a Supreme Court opinion might correlate with characteristics of the majority coalition Lindquist 2008, 2012).…”

Section: Federal Courts and Citationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideological Determinants of Citations to Supreme Court Precedent Across the Federal Judiciary

Salam

2022

J. law courts

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How do ideological factors explain the citation patterns of federal courts? Current literature uses citation data in myriad ways but leaves open the question of how ideological factors may influence citation from each level of the judicial hierarchy differently. Combining original data on citations to Supreme Court opinions by district courts from 1969 to 2005 with existing data on citations by the courts of appeals and Supreme Court, I present a more complete portrait of the scope of a precedent across the federal judiciary. I find that ideological factors are associated with differences in citing behavior on the federal courts. Both the appellate and district courts are responsive to Supreme Court precedent, but district courts are not equally responsive to liberal and conservative updates to doctrine. Further, as the Supreme Court ideology changes from the time of setting precedent, appellate courts are less likely to cite the precedent, but district courts cite it more. These results suggest that the relationship between ideology and precedent adherence is complicated by the distinct institutional features of the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts.

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“…Regrettably, however, while all of these factors have been vetted within prior work, prior analyses largely neglect to consider how individual justices may influence the attentiveness to their opinions, both theoretically and empirically (but see Masood and Kassow 2020). Anecdotally, there is reason to believe that Supreme Court justices differ in their writing styles across several dimensions.…”

Section: Us Supreme Court Justices and Their Influence On Lower Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a Name: How US Supreme Court Justices Shape Law and Policy in the Lower Courts

Masood¹,

Kassow²

2022

Law Soc. Inq.

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We investigate whether inherent differences between the majority opinions of US Supreme Court justices result in certain justices being systematically more influential compared to their peers. We offer a theory in which lower court adoption of the Supreme Court’s precedents are influenced through justice opinion attributes, case characteristics, and circuit-level influences. To test the predictions, we examine the universe of responses by US Courts of Appeals to the signed majority opinions of individual justices by assembling a dataset of over 130,000 observations. We assess the interdependence of the mechanisms at work through a coarsened exact matching algorithm. We find that intricate tendencies in opinion writing disparately impact lower court attentiveness to the Supreme Court’s decisions. These findings offer new and important implications toward a richer understanding of the influence of individual justices on legal development and policy adoption in the American courts.

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The Sum of its Parts: How Supreme Court Justices Disparately Shape Attention to Their Opinions

Cited by 5 publications

References 53 publications

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

Ideological Determinants of Citations to Supreme Court Precedent Across the Federal Judiciary

What’s in a Name: How US Supreme Court Justices Shape Law and Policy in the Lower Courts

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