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Doctrine Formulation And Distrust, Toby J. Heytens

Toby J Heytens

Legal scholars exhaustively debate the substantive wisdom of Supreme Court decisions and the appropriate methods for interpreting legal texts, but rarely consider the more pragmatic need to craft rules that will be faithfully implemented by the lower court judges who have the last word in the overwhelming majority of cases. Political scientists, in contrast, invest tremendous effort seeking to determine whether lower courts “comply” with Supreme Court directives, but find themselves unable to explain why their own studies generally find high levels of compliance. This Article argues that part of the answer lies in the Court’s ability to craft legal …