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Full-Text Articles in Law
Rules Against Rulification, Michael Coenen
Rules Against Rulification, Michael Coenen
Journal Articles
The Supreme Court often confronts the choice between bright-line rules and open-ended standards — a point well understood by commentators and the Court itself. Far less understood is a related choice that arises once the Court has opted for a standard over a rule: May lower courts develop subsidiary rules to facilitate their own application of the Supreme Court’s standard, or must they always apply that standard in its pure, un-“rulified” form? In several recent cases, spanning a range of legal contexts, the Court has endorsed the latter option, fortifying its first-order standards with second-order “rules against rulification.” Rules against …
Measuring Circuit Splits: A Cautionary Note, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl
Measuring Circuit Splits: A Cautionary Note, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl
Faculty Publications
A number of researchers have recently published new measures of the Supreme Court’s behavior in resolving conflicts in the lower courts. These new measures represent an improvement over prior, cruder approaches, but it turns out that measuring the Court’s resolutions of conflicts is surprisingly difficult. The aim of this methodological comment is to describe those difficulties and to establish several conclusions that follow from them. First, the new measures of the Court’s behavior are certainly imprecise and may reflect biased samples. Second, using the Supreme Court Database, which some studies rely on to assemble a dataset of cases resolving conflicts, …