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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Endgame Of Court-Packing, Kyle Rozema, Daniel Epps, Adam Chilton, Maya Sen
The Endgame Of Court-Packing, Kyle Rozema, Daniel Epps, Adam Chilton, Maya Sen
Scholarship@WashULaw
At several points in history, politicians and commentators have proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court to accomplish partisan ends. We explore the incentives for a political party to initiate “court-packing” and what the Supreme Court would look like in a world where political parties engage in repeated partisan court- packing. To do so, we use an Agent-Based Model and different data sources to calibrate the behaviors of Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Court justices. We then simulate the future composition of the Court in worlds with and without court-packing. The simulations suggest that a political party with an initial minority …
Lower Court Discretion, Pauline Kim
Lower Court Discretion, Pauline Kim
Scholarship@WashULaw
Empirical scholars typically model the judicial hierarchy in terms of a principal-agent relationship in which the Supreme Court, the principal, sets policy and the lower federal courts, as agents, must implement that policy faithfully. The law is a signal - the means by which the Court communicates its preferences. This article argues instead for recognizing the law as an independent normative force. Empirical scholars fail to take seriously the role of law because they reject as implausible formalistic accounts of its operation. This article advances a more nuanced account of how law shapes the decision-making environment, one that focuses on …