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State Court Influence on US Supreme Court Opinions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Jennifer Bowie  and
Elisha Carol Savchak
Jennifer Bowie*
Affiliation:
University of Richmond, USA
Elisha Carol Savchak
Affiliation:
Elon University, USA
*
Contact the corresponding author, Jennifer Bowie, at jbowie@richmond.edu.
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Abstract

Despite our understanding that the US Supreme Court influences lower courts in a top-down fashion, we examine whether state courts influence Supreme Court work, namely, its majority opinions. This study of lower court influence on Supreme Court opinion writing investigates whether and when justices borrow language from state court opinions. While our fundamental interest is in whether the writings of state court judges are influential in Supreme Court opinions, we further investigate whether justices’ biases against elected judiciaries and favor for appointed systems play a role here. Our original data set includes Supreme Court cases reviewing state court decisions from 1995 to 2015. Results show that the potential for lower court influence differs for appointed versus elected state court judges, lending valuable insight into the discussion of judicial power and institutional design. Meanwhile, state courts play an important role in the development of law at the Supreme Court.

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Articles
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Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 139 - 165
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

A prior version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 31–September 4, 2017. We would like to thank Chantel Baker for her invaluable research assistance. Replication materials are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KMRWUS.

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