Showing papers by "Donald R. Songer published in 1990"

Supreme Court Impact On Compliance and Outcomes: Miranda and New York Times in the United States Courts of Appeals

Abstract: series of studies in the past two decades, usually referred to as "judicial impact" studies, have vitiated the traditional assumption that lower courts automatically adopt and diffuse the constitutional interpretations announced by the Supreme Court. In fact, several scholars have concluded that these judicial impact studies suggest that constitutional rules as announced by the Supreme Court, often have little influence on the behavior of judges and other officials in the legal system (Baum 1978: 208; Wasby 1973: 1086). But there is reason to doubt that the judicial impact literature presents an accurate appraisal of the overall significance of Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution for lower courts. Extant empirical research deals primarily with a highly biased sample of controversial civil liberties decisions, especially those of the Warren Court (Baum 1978). In effect, the studies to date may have been biased because they are limited to the small portion of the court's output for which the chances for significant impact were the smallest. Moreover, most research on judicial impact has examined the response of state courts because that is where scholars expected to find noncompliance. Much less attention has been given to the impact of the Supreme Court on the lower federal courts (Gruhl 1980: 504). This suggests that one should expect to find greater impact if federal court decisions, especially those dealing with economic issues or even less highly charged civil liberties decisions (e.g., libel cases) are examined. Baum (1978) also suggests that the impact of the Supreme Court should increase as the clarity of its opinions increase and should be greatest for courts which are most directly under the authority of the Supreme Court. Moreover, since reversal is a significant sanction for lower court judges, the probability of reversal may be expected to enhance impact. While all of Baum's observations on factors which are likely to affect impact appear plausible, none has received adequate empirical examination. Impact studies have also been handicapped by excessive attention to the relatively narrow and artificially dichotomous concept of compliance. Much of the literature on the impact of the Supreme Court on lower courts has dealt

The Impact of Party and Region On Voting Decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals, 1955-1986:

Abstract: nalysts of American political institutions have firmly established that party and region are important factors in voting behavior at both mass and elite levels of analysis. In this paper we examine the influence of party and region on the decisions of judges of the United States Courts of Appeals. Studies of voting patterns on the United States Supreme Court (Tate 1981), the federal district courts (Carp and Rowland 1983), and state appellate courts (see, for example, Ulmer 1962; Nagel 1961) have found both partisan and regional differences among judges. A number of studies of the United States Courts of Appeals have discovered significant differences in the voting patterns of Democratic and Republican judges on a wide spectrum of issues (Goldman 1966, 1975; Songer 1982; Gottschall 1983, 1986; Tomasi and Velona 1987). Such studies have found patterns that parallel the partisan differences in congressional voting: Democratic appellate judges are more likely than their Republican counterparts to support unions in labor management cases, defendants in criminal appeals, a liberal position in civil liberties cases, and the federal government in its attempts to regulate the economy. Carp and Rowland (1983) found modest regional differences between northern and southern judges on the federal district courts but they found no consistent differences between judges from the East and West. Both Democratic and Republican judges from the North were more liberal than their southern counterparts on criminal justice issues and on labor and economic management issues. The magnitude of regional differences increased substantially after 1968. For civil liberties issues, southern judges were slightly more liberal than northern judges from 1933 to 1968, but after 1968 northern judges in both parties became substantially more liberal than southern judges. More recently, Wenner and Dutter (1989) discovered significant differences for both the federal district and appeals courts among some of the circuits on environmental cases. However, the differences among circuits did not always follow regional lines consistently and they concluded that regional effects were more pronounced at the trial than at the appellate level.