Majority opinion

About: Majority opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54845 citations. The topic is also known as: opinion of the court.

Updating Supreme Court Legitimacy: Testing the 'Rule, Learn, Update' Model of Political Communication

Abstract: One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal-conservative) continuum. Moreover, citizens are thought to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model’s assumptions using five empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.

roe v. Wade: the rhetoric of fetal life.

Abstract: Court decisions themselves, and not just arguments before courts, are rhetorical works The Supreme Court majority opinion in the publicized 1973 abortion case Roe v Wade demonstrated this rhetorical nature of decisions both in its choice of arguments and evidence and in its effort to organize symbolically the world of the medical and legal considerations surrounding abortion

A Century of Citation Practice on the Supreme Court of Victoria

Abstract: Examination of citations contained in the written record of judicial decisions provides useful insights into the evolution of the jurisprudence and policy formation of particular courts and of the judges who make significant contributions to those courts. It also sheds light on the process of judicial innovation and on communication patterns between courts. While there are several studies of the citation practices of courts in Canada and the United States, there are few such studies for Australian courts. The present paper examines the citation practice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the highest court in Australia's second largest state, over the century 1905-2005 at ten year intervals. It employs the McCormick taxonomy of citations which distinguishes between consistency, hierarchical, coordinate and deference citations within the judicial system and tracks also citations to secondary authorities. Major findings of the study are that the length of judgments and the number of authorities cited by the Court have increased over time, and that consistency and hierarchical citations are the dominant form of allusion to prior authority. While these findings relate to only a single court, the Supreme Court of Victoria is an important intermediate appellate court within the Australian court hierarchy and, as such, the results are of relevance to those interested in the workings of other Australian state supreme courts and, indeed, intermediate appellate courts in general.

Trading Votes for Reasoning: Covering in Judicial Opinions

Abstract: Several studies report that judges on panels together with at least one judge of a different political party (a "mixed panel") tend to moderate their votes, particularly on politically charged subject matter cases We examine whether this observed moderation in voting is the product of bargaining among mixed panel judges, where authoring judges, who might otherwise face a dissenting vote (or find themselves in dissent), trade their votes for the ability to craft a unanimous majority opinion closer to their own policy preferences and thereby affect the opinion's precedential value Using judicial citation patterns within individual opinions as a proxy for how judges reason, we report that authoring judges on mixed panels are more likely to employ partisan reasoning for opinions relating to salient subject matter areas Partisan reasoning in top salient areas is higher where the authoring judges have more bargaining leverage over opposite party judges on the same panel Finally, partisanship in top salient areas is greater for authoring judges who have greater skill at writing influential opinions The overall pattern is consistent with judges engaging in covering: moderating their voting when associated with an opposite party judge on the same panel, a highly visible activity, but adjusting the judicial reasoning in the opinion to tilt the decision back toward the authoring judge's own preferred ideological position, a less visible activity done under the cover of the more visible, moderated vote

Simulating Supreme Court Decision Making.

Abstract: Students of the judiciary have long been concerned with the factors that contribute to decision-making at the individual and institutional levels. In particular, analysts have focused a great deal of attention on the Supreme Court and the behavior of its members. Despite this attention, analysts have differed as to the relative influence of the factors justices rely upon when making their decisions. Even the courses taught in a standard political science undergraduate curriculum send mixed signals about these factors to students. Basic constitutional law courses tend to overestimate the role of doctrinal interpretation and precedent and underestimate the impact of the values and attitudes of the Court's members. Courses on the judicial process and politics err in the opposite direction. When the decision-making literature is viewed as a whole, five basic determinants of judicial decisions emerge: the background of the justice (Tate 1981), the justice's attitudes and values (Rohde and Spaeth 1976), the dynamics inherent in small-groups (Murphy 1964; Woodward and Armstrong 1979), the member's conception of the role of the Court (Howard 1977), and the impact of external stimuli (Casper and Posner 1974). Some of these variables can be measured, but some are very difficult to gauge. As a consequence, analysts cannot accurately assess the relative impact of these five factors upon the individual's decision.