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Standing The Test Of Time: The Breadth Of Majority Coalitions And The Fate Of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents, Stuart Benjamin, Bruce Desmarais
Standing The Test Of Time: The Breadth Of Majority Coalitions And The Fate Of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents, Stuart Benjamin, Bruce Desmarais
Bruce A. Desmarais
Should a strategic Justice assemble a broader coalition for the majority opinion than is necessary, even if that means accommodating changes that move the opinion away from the author’s ideal holding? If the author’s objective is to durably move the law to his or her ideal holding, the conventional answer is no, because there is a cost and no corresponding benefit. We consider whether attracting a broad majority coalition can placate future courts. Controlling for the size of the coalition, we find that cases with ideologically narrow coalitions are more likely to be treated negatively by later courts. Specifically, adding …
Ideology 'All The Way Down'? An Empirical Study Of Establishment Clause Decisions In The Federal Courts, Gregory Sisk, Michael Heise
Ideology 'All The Way Down'? An Empirical Study Of Establishment Clause Decisions In The Federal Courts, Gregory Sisk, Michael Heise
Michael Heise
As part of our ongoing empirical examination of religious liberty decisions in the lower federal courts, we studied Establishment Clause rulings by federal court of appeals and district court judges from 1996 through 2005. The powerful role of political factors in Establishment Clause decisions appears undeniable and substantial, whether celebrated as the proper integration of political and moral reasoning into constitutional judging, shrugged off as mere realism about judges being motivated to promote their political attitudes, or deprecated as a troubling departure from the aspirational ideal of neutral and impartial judging. In the context of Church and State cases in …
The Great Attributional Divide: How Legal Policy Debates Are Shaped By Divergent Views Of Human Nature, Adam Benforado, Jon Hanson
The Great Attributional Divide: How Legal Policy Debates Are Shaped By Divergent Views Of Human Nature, Adam Benforado, Jon Hanson
Adam Benforado
This article, the first of a multipart series, argues that a major rift runs across many of our major policy debates based on our attributional tendencies: the less accurate dispositionist approach, which explains outcomes and behavior with reference to people's dispositions (i.e., personalities, preferences, and the like), and the more accurate situationist approach, which bases attributions of causation and responsibility on unseen influences within us and around us. Given that situationism offers a truer picture of our world than the alternative, and given that attributional tendencies are largely the result of elements in our situations, identifying the relevant elements should …