Why do policy-motivated justices conform to unfavorable precedents? This article suggests that two theories, social-legal backgrounds and precedential characteristics, help explain why justices support unfavorable precedents. To test the explanatory power of these theories, the article uses data from the 1953-94 terms that ascertains whether justices cast precedential votes. The results, after ...

We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2) binding precedent, and (3) pre-dispute bargaining done in the “shadow” of precedent-setting courts. The pre-dispute bargaining creates an endog...

Explanation-based Generalization depends on having an explanation on which to base generalization. Thus, a system with an incomplete or intractable explanatory mechanism will not be able to generalize some examples. It is not necessary, in those cases, to give up and resort to purely empirical generalization methods, because the system may already know almost everything it needs to explain the ...

Lower courts supposedly follow Supreme Court precedent—but they often don’t. Instead of adhering to the most persuasive interpretations of the Court’s opinions, lower courts often adopt narrower readings. For example, recent courts of appeals’ decisions have narrowly interpreted the Court’s rulings on police searches, gun control, and campaign finance. This practice—which I call “narrowing from...

The advances observed in the last years in telecommunication technologies rapidly brought along new ways of doing business. This new reality, however, has not been so rapidly followed by the entities responsible for dealing with the conflicts that arise from these interactions, now undertaken in an electronic format. Traditional paper-based courts, designed for the industrial era, are now outda...

We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002 in he United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren Court. We further describe a method for creating aut...

Generalized Precedent Logics for Resolving Insecurity Dilemmas This paper proposes the development and application of a series of gradually more powerful "reflective" logical procedures to increasingly complex and realistic sets of data on collective insecurity dilemmas. Such procedures place behavioral time series data within narratively structured practical contexts. Such accounts seek ground...