Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court

Judicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S. Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—of the law on justices' decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial restraint, and a strict interpretation of the First Amendment's protection of speech clause. We find considerable evidence that legal factors play an important role in Supreme Court decision making. We also find that the effect of legal factors varies across justices.

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On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision Making

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1964223 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 86 (2) ◽

pp. 323-337 ◽

Cited By ~ 151

Author(s):

Tracey E. George ◽

Lee Epstein

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Supreme Court Decision ◽

Court Decision ◽

Court Cases ◽

Political Factors ◽

Stare Decisis ◽

Legal Perspective ◽

Legal Model ◽

Legal Frameworks

How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.

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Supreme Court Decision Making: New Institutionalist Approaches. Edited by Cornell W. Clayton and Howard Gillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 344p. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s000305540133201x ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 95 (1) ◽

pp. 210-212

Author(s):

Michael McCann

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Supreme Court Decision ◽

Court Decision ◽

Policy Preferences ◽

Collective Response ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Institutional Contexts ◽

University Of Chicago Press ◽

The U.S

The editors of this timely volume announce at the outset that their aim is to provide a forum for recent scholarship that reacts critically to the previous generation of behavioralists who, since the 1950s, have analyzed the U.S. Supreme Court as little more than an aggregate of the relatively stable and identifiable policy preferences held by individual justices. Specifically, these essays pose a collective "response by a succeeding generation of Supreme Court scholars who are trained in political behavioralism but who have rediscovered the value and importance of understanding institutional contexts" (p. 12).

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