Tom Clark and Benjamin Lauderdale , “ Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space ”
نویسندگان
چکیده
Clark and Lauderdale develop a novel approach for orienting Supreme Court opinions in unidimensional policy space. They argue that the most important portion of a Court’s opinion is not its judgment in favor of one party or another, but its reasoning, for it is this reasoning that becomes binding law and shapes the path of American legal development. The authors thus measure the policy orientation of a court’s opinion on the basis of how it cites precedents that is, whether it cites a given precedent favorably or negatively. Since Court opinions frequently cite the same precedents, this approach allows Clark and Lauderdale to discriminate the policy orientation of a given opinion. They leverage this method on an original dataset of all 851 search and seizure opinions and all 217 freedom of religion opinions proclaimed by the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist courts. They subsequently devise their own measure of justices’ ideal points on the basis of whether the justices joined the majority opinions that Clark and Lauderdale had already oriented in unidimensional policy space. Clark and Lauderdale then leverage their estimates of opinions’ policy positions and justices’ ideal points to test three theories of intra-Court bargaining: The median voter model, which assumes that Court opinions will mirror the ideal point of the Court’s median justice; the author monopoly model, which assumes that Court opinions will mirror the ideal point of their author; and the median majority coalition member model, which assumes that Court opinions will mirror the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition. The authors find the strongest support for the median majority coalition member model, moderate support for the median voter model, and no support for the author monopoly model.
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