An Empirical Analysis of Supreme Court Justices' Decision Making

Youngsik Lim

The Journal of Legal Studies, 2000, vol. 29, issue 2, 721-52

Abstract: The intrinsic problem in empirically analyzing Supreme Court justices' decisionmaking is that cases before the Court are not necessarily independent of the justices. When a justice has taken part in deciding a precedent of a current case, her present decision should be affected by her past decision. This effect, the most common feature under the common-law system, would impose a difficulty in doing empirical research about judicial decisionmaking. Thus, without controlling for this path-dependent effect, any test cannot help but be incomplete. Focusing on the votes of justices categorized by ideological direction, in this paper I develop a model that explicitly considers individual justices' voting in the precedents. Using about 600 relations of Supreme Court cases between a later decision and a precedent, I quantify the effects of institutional and individual stare decisis and, furthermore, decompose various factors affecting individual justice's decisionmaking. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.

Date: 2000
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