Who Drives the Ideological Makeup of the Lower Federal Courts in a Divided Government?

Scherer, Nancy

doi:10.2307/3185390

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…However, none of the aforementioned work discusses the relationship between confirmation conditions and the subsequent voting patterns of justices. Scherer (2001) does offer an analysis of Bill Clinton's appointments to the lower federal courts before and after the Senate changed hands in 1994 but finds no significant differences in voting behavior. Yet we feel that appointments at the level of the Supreme Court, which will not invoke the notion of “senatorial courtesy,” may be more likely to engender consternation between the president and an opposing Senate.…”

Section: Scholarship On Divided Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Divided Government on the Supreme Court Appointment Process: An Assessment of Judicial Extremism, 1946‐2009

Sharma

Scheb

2011

Politics & Policy

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The desirability of complete judicial independence has been debated in several recent works. At issue is whether democratic theory is compatible with policy making by the unelected U.S. Supreme Court justices, particularly as their service becomes further removed from the time when elected officials played a role in their appointment. We examine the relationship between appointing presidents and Supreme Court justices. Relying on ideal points that place all actors in the same scale, our regression models show that a justice will drift from the ideology of an appointing president with each additional term served, even after controlling for ideological shifts in political climate. The beginning of the eleventh term is when ideological drift becomes significant. The connection between justices and democratically elected officials begins to wane after this point in a justice's tenure-a finding that is likely to be germane for proponents of term limits for Supreme Court justices.

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Section: Scholarship On Divided Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Divided Government on the Supreme Court Appointment Process: An Assessment of Judicial Extremism, 1946‐2009

Sharma

Scheb

2011

Politics & Policy

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“…American appellate court judges, often reaching office after a career of political activism or holding office, are more likely than the professionally selected, bureaucratically trained judges of most other countries to see themselves not merely as legal technicians but as social problem-solvers. That is why their political ideology matters: in tough cases, Democratic judges tend to decide differently from Republican judges (Gottschall 1986;Segal and Spaeth 1993;Scherer 2001).…”

Section: Is Adversarial Legalism Democratic?mentioning

confidence: 99%

On Surveying the Whole Legal Forest

Kagan¹

2003

Law and Social Inquiry

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I am always amazed by newspaper reports of the way that geologists and space scientists draw complex conclusions about the origin or nature of a planet from data sent back by a probe of one tiny part of the planet's surface. They seem to have a lot of confidence in their underlying theories. The same is not true for sociolegal scholars. We don't have full-fledged theories about how legal systems actually work, and hence it seems risky to make big generalizations about a system as a whole based on a study of one or two legal institutions or processes. Making generalizations about the "law in action" for whole legal systems is especially risky if the subject is the United States, with its 50 different state legal systems, from Mississippi to Montana to Massachusetts, and with its proliferation of different kinds of courts, law enforcement bodies, police departments, administrative tribunals, and regulatory agencies, state, federal and local. Small wonder that most empirical sociolegal scholarship is relatively narrowly focused on specific legal policy areas and processes. While these case studies are immensely valuable, occasionally it seems worthwhile to use the scholarly close-ups of particular clumps of trees to draw some wide-angle conclusions, however tentative, about the shape and dynamics of the legal forest. That, however quixotic the effort, is what I sought to do in Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (hereinafter AL). But just as Don Quixote needed the skeptical realism of Sancho Panza, the essays on AL in this issue, paying close attention to text, empirical detail, and analytic precision, serve as a reminder of the pitfalls attending the quest for generality. Yet I am not quite willing to don the Quixote costume. In this essay I will argue that AL, even if a bit ambitious, is reasonably realistic, and that the questions raised by the other essays raise meaningful but not Robert A. Kagan is professor of political science and law, University of California, Berkeley. Many thanks to David Johnson for organizing the Law and Society Association panel that led to this exchange.

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Section: Explaining Adversarial Legalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Surveying the Whole Legal Forest

Kagan¹

2003

Law & Social Inquiry

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I am always amazed by newspaper reports of the way that geologists and space scientists draw complex conclusions about the origin or nature of a planet from data sent back by a probe of one tiny part of the planet's surface. They seem to have a lot of confidence in their underlying theories. The same is not true for sociolegal scholars. We don't have full-fledged theories about how legal systems actually work, and hence it seems risky to make big generalizations about a system as a whole based on a study of one or two legal institutions or processes. Making generalizations about the "law in action" for whole legal systems is especially risky if the subject is the United States, with its 50 different state legal systems, from Mississippi to Montana to Massachusetts, and with its proliferation of different kinds of courts, law enforcement bodies, police departments, administrative tribunals, and regulatory agencies, state, federal and local. Small wonder that most empirical sociolegal scholarship is relatively narrowly focused on specific legal policy areas and processes. While these case studies are immensely valuable, occasionally it seems worthwhile to use the scholarly close-ups of particular clumps of trees to draw some wide-angle conclusions, however tentative, about the shape and dynamics of the legal forest. That, however quixotic the effort, is what I sought to do in Adversarial Legalism: The American Way o f b w (hereinafter AL). But just as Don Quixote needed the skeptical realism of Sancho Panza, the essays on AL in this issue, paying close attention to text, empirical detail, and analytic precision, serve as a reminder of the pitfalls attending the quest for generality. Yet I am not quite willing to don the Quixote costume. In this essay I will argue that AL, even if a bit ambitious, is reasonably realistic, and that the questions raised by the other essays raise meaningful but not Robert A. Kagan is professor of political science and law, University of California, Berkeley. Many thanks to David Johnson for organizing the Law and Society Association panel that led to this exchange.

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Who Drives the Ideological Makeup of the Lower Federal Courts in a Divided Government?

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

The Impact of Divided Government on the Supreme Court Appointment Process: An Assessment of Judicial Extremism, 1946‐2009

The Impact of Divided Government on the Supreme Court Appointment Process: An Assessment of Judicial Extremism, 1946‐2009

On Surveying the Whole Legal Forest

On Surveying the Whole Legal Forest

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