Journal ArticleDOI
On the Fluidity of Judicial Choice
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In this article, the authors present empirical findings as a basis to critique some current research techniques in hopes of contributing to the analytical synthesis which must come if the discipline is to make a concerted advance in understanding judicial behavior.Abstract:
Within the past decade, a significant change has occurred in political science literature about the judiciary. The central questions have shifted from public law concerns—what is the law and its value?—to a primary focus on decision-making and process—how and why courts decide what they do, and with what political effects? The Supreme Court still dominates professional attention, but a host of new research techniques (jurimetrics and socialization studies, content and capability analysis, small group theory, etc.) vie for the allegiance of researchers.1 The variety of methods in vogue is formidable, and a testament to the borrowing power of the profession. So has been the sound and fury accompanying the change. The new approaches are perhaps too young to attempt a synthesis with traditional methods of analysis or even among themselves. Yet it is never too early to locate unities of inquiry, including common problems. The object of this essay is to air one difficulty facing virtually every student of the judicial process—the fluidity of judicial choice—and to examine some of its implications for research in and normative evaluation of judicial behavior. The general argument should be stated at the outset. My purpose is to present empirical findings as a basis to critique some current research techniques in hopes of contributing to the analytical synthesis which must come if the discipline is to make a concerted advance in understanding judicial behavior. From a research standpoint, an unfortunate by-product of the debate between the “quantifiers” and the “qualifiers,” as Joseph Tanenhaus has distinguished them, is that extremes of advocacy have obscured the much more important
things that students of the judiciary share in common than the methodological differences which agitate them.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Institutional Dynamics on the U.S. Court of Appeals: Minority Representation Under Panel Decision Making
Sean Farhang,Gregory J. Wawro +1 more
TL;DR: The authors assesses how the institutional context of decision making on three-judge panels of the federal Court of Appeals affects the impact that gender and race have on judicial decisions and find that the norm of unanimity on panels grants women influence over outcomes even when they are outnumbered on a panel.
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Toward a Strategic Revolution in Judicial Politics: A Look Back, A Look Ahead
Lee Epstein,Jack Knight +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the strategic revolution in the field of judicial politics and provide an intellectual history of the field, with special emphasis on why judicial specialists resisted strategic analysis for so long and why they are now turning to it in ever increasing numbers.
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FROM SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY: The Development of Theory in The Study of Judicial Behavior
TL;DR: The authors assesses the development of theories of judicial behavior in the United States in the past few decades and argue that the predominant frameworks for analyzing judicial behavior (attitude theory, fact pattern theory, role theory, small group theory, organization theory and environmental theories) are not incompatible and can be at least partially integrated.
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Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court
TL;DR: In this article, the authors formulate a game-theoretic model of bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court, where a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an open rule for the other justices.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Norm of Consensus on the U.S. Supreme Court
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use the docket books of Chief Justice Waite (1874-1888) and make the following argument: if a norm of consensus induced unanimity on Courts of by-gone eras, then the norm may have manifested itself through public unanimity in the face of private conference disagreements.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe
TL;DR: In the infancy of a science the use even of fairly crude methods of analysis and description can produce surprisingly large increments of knowledge if new perspectives are brought to bear upon available data as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Supreme Court as a Small Group
TL;DR: It is found that a change in self-health rating from 1952 to 1954 is accompanied by a corresponding change in the attitudinal or behavioral correlates of health from 1950 to 1954, supporting the acceptability of self-ratings of health as valid measures of "perceived" health.