61 results
Considerations in Personality Measurement: Replicability, Transparency, and Predictive Validity
- Matthew E. K. Hall, Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr., Jonathan D. Klingler, Adam J. Ramey
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Law and Courts / Volume 9 / Issue 2 / Fall 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 October 2022, pp. 397-405
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implementing their preferred approach runs afoul of many contemporary social scientific norms, our use of concurrences to estimate personality traits is far more justifiable than they suggest (especially in contrast to their use of lower court opinions), and their substantive critiques reflect a potential misunderstanding of the nature of conscientiousness. Nonetheless, we also acknowledge their broader point regarding the state-of-the-art textual analysis methodology vis-à-vis the estimation of personality traits, and we provide some constructive suggestions for the path forward.
Understanding Judicial Power: Divided Government, Institutional Thickness, and High-Court Influence on State Incarceration
- Matthew E. K. Hall, Jason Harold Windett
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Law and Courts / Volume 3 / Issue 1 / Spring 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 October 2022, pp. 167-191
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influence is stronger in states with divided partisan governments and occurs more quickly in states that lack intermediate appellate courts. Our findings suggest that legislative gridlock and institutional thickness significantly constrain judicial impact.
The Role of Emotional Language in Briefs before the US Supreme Court
- Ryan C. Black, Matthew E. K. Hall, Ryan J. Owens, Eve M. Ringsmuth
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Law and Courts / Volume 4 / Issue 2 / Fall 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 October 2022, pp. 377-407
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using an automated textual analysis program, we find that parties who employ less emotional language in their briefs are more likely to win a justice’s vote, a result that holds even after controlling for other features correlated with success, such as case quality. These findings suggest that advocates seeking to influence judges can enhance their credibility and attract justices’ votes by employing measured, objective language.
Attributes beyond Attitudes: Personality Traits on the US Supreme Court
- Matthew E. K. Hall, Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr., Jonathan D. Klingler, Adam J. Ramey
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Law and Courts / Volume 9 / Issue 2 / Fall 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 October 2022, pp. 345-369
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 through 2015 terms based on the language in their written opinions. We then conduct an empirical application to demonstrate the importance of these Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates and discuss their proper use.
2 - Goals and Personality
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 13-34
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Explaining the behavior of US Supreme Court justices requires an understanding of the justices’ goals. That is, in order to understand what justices do, we must understand what justices want, and what justices want depends on who the justices are. I start from the premise that judges are real people, not legalistic automatons or single-minded ideologues. As such, they are motivated by multiple goals. That is, when justices make decisions, they care about more than one objective, and they make decisions with those multiple objectives in mind. Moreover, because judges are people, they are motivated by many of the same goals that motivate most people in their personal and professional lives.
For example, consider a group of college students enrolled in a typical academic course. What do the students want? Most students probably want to succeed in the course, although different students may have different ideas of what success means – some students may want an “A”; others may be content to pass. But they have other desires as well. Most students would prefer to learn interesting material rather than study a dull topic. Some students hope to impress the professor and earn a letter of recommendation. Others may enjoy interacting with their classmates in discussions and group projects. Some may even want to meet new friends through the class. And, of course, every student probably wants to limit the amount of time and energy they devote to the course so they can work on other courses, participate in extracurricular activities, and enjoy leisure time. In short, college students pursue multiple goals; therefore, any time students make decisions, multiple motivations influence their choices. When selecting a partner for a class project, a student might consider their potential partner's intelligence, scheduling availability, or even sense of humor because each of these qualities may help the student achieve various goals, such as academic success, convenience, or enjoyment.
The same principle applies to Supreme Court justices. Of course, given the Court's elite and exclusive status, the justices likely share more similarities than students in a random college class.
Acknowledgments
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp xiii-xiv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - Agenda Setting
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 50-67
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that racially segregated schools are unconstitutional. In the decision's wake, Southern states and localities initiated a variety of policies designed to avoid desegregation without openly defying the Court's ruling. One of the most popular methods of resisting desegregation was the adoption of a pupil placement plan, which granted local officials “practically unreviewable discretion” to assign individual students to local schools. These laws authorized school administrators to place students in specific schools based on a wide variety of racially neutral criteria, such as residence, psychological fitness, scholastic aptitude, health, and moral standards. Because placement plans allowed so many factors to be considered in student assignment, it was nearly impossible to prove that a specific student's assignment to a specific school was racially motivated. And, because the plans purported to utilize individual treatment, it was extremely difficult to bring a class-action suit challenging these laws.
When the parents of African American students in Sumter City, South Carolina, did bring a suit challenging a pupil placement plan, the South Carolina legislature erected an additional legal hurdle designed to impede their case. After a trial court initially denied relief to the parents in 1956, the legislature passed a new law prescribing additional administrative remedies for such lawsuits. Consequently, when the parents appealed their case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Hood v. Board of Trustees, the federal court denied the appeal on the grounds that they had not yet exhausted their options under state law. Dissatisfied with the Fourth Circuit's ruling, the parents filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the US Supreme Court. They argued that, rather than offering a potential remedy, the new South Carolina law was actually a transparent device with which the state hoped to evade judicial oversight and enforcement of the Brown decision.
The Fourth Circuit's ruling in Hood was well-grounded in the law: Petitioners must generally exhaust their options in state court before appealing to a federal court for relief.
Appendix B - Opinion Assignment Analysis
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 157-160
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Table B.1 reports the results of the opinion assignment models. The data consist of majority opinion assignments to 34 justices during the 1946 through 2015 terms. Unless noted otherwise, the data were obtained from the Supreme Court Database. The dependent variable indicates whether each justice was assigned to write the majority opinion in each case (1 = assigned; 0 = not assigned). I conduct two separate analyses: one for the 5,844 cases in which the chief justice assigned the majority opinion (N = 41, 598) and one for the 1,093 cases in which the senior associate justice (SAJ) assigned the majority opinion (N = 6, 112). Modeling opinion assignments is especially complex because “the likelihood that a chief will assign the opinion to one justice is dependent on the probability that the chief justice will assign it to another member of the majority.” Because my models include an interaction term with an assignment specific variable (winning margin), I follow Maltzman and Wahlbeck by utilizing a random effects estimator for case. Therefore, I employ multilevel logistic regression models with random intercepts for case. However, my results are also robust to including random intercepts for justice. Both models include the justices’ SCIPEs for the Big Five (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Openness), as well as the following control variables:
• The Winning Margin, which was calculated by subtracting the number of votes needed to form a winning coalition from the number of justices voting with the assignor (e.g., when all nine justices participate, the winning margin is zero if the majority has five justices and four if the decision is unanimous), as well as an interaction term between Winning Margin and Agreeableness.
• The number of majority opinions written by each justice on the same legal issue in prior terms (Issue Experience).
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one for justices in their first term on the Court and zero otherwise (Freshman Justice).
• The absolute difference in Segal–Cover ideology scores between each justice and the majority opinion assigner, whether the chief justice or the SAJ (Distance to Assigner).
8 - Separate Opinions
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 131-145
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
George Chahsenah, a member of the Comanche Nation, died on October 11, 1963. His sole heir was an estranged, illegitimate daughter who, according to his will, had “shown no interest in” him. Therefore, Chahsenah bequeathed his entire estate to his niece and her three children, with whom he had lived for many years before his death. However, because his estate consisted of three Comanche allotments, US law required the secretary of the interior to approve the inheritance. Chahsenah's daughter challenged the will, arguing that her father had suffered from chronic alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, and diabetes, rendering him incompetent.
An examiner of inheritance for the Department of the Interior determined that the will was properly executed, witness statements showed that Chahsenah possessed testamentary capacity, and Chahsenah's failure to provide for his daughter was not unnatural since there had been no close relationship. However, the regional solicitor, acting for the secretary of the interior, set aside the examiner's action and ordered distribution to the daughter. Chahsenah's niece brought suit in the District Court, contending that the regional solicitor's action exceeded his authority. The District Court ruled for the niece, but the Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the secretary's action was unreviewable. On appeal, the US Supreme Court sided with the niece and reversed the secretary's action in Tooahnippah v. Hickel. After the Court's conference, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger assigned the majority opinion to himself.
Justice John Marshall Harlan II thought Tooahnippah was a “peewee” case – his term for insignificant matters that reached the High Court – but he disagreed with the secretary of the interior's “high-handed paternalism” and voted with the majority to reverse the court of appeals. Harlan expected the chief justice to produce an opinion ordering the secretary to approve Chahsenah's will and distribute the inheritance to the niece, but he was disappointed with the first draft Burger circulated. Instead of fully resolving the case, Burger had restricted the opinion to the question of whether federal courts had the power to review the secretary's order.
Appendix A - Agenda-Setting Analysis
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 153-156
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Table A.1 reports the results of the agenda setting model. The data consist of cert votes by 12 justices in a random sample of 358 paid nondeath penalty petitions coming out of a federal court of appeals that made the US Supreme Court's discuss list during the 1986 through 1993 terms. The data and the control variables were derived from Black and Owens’ study of Supreme Court agenda setting. The dependent variable is each justice's cert vote in each case (1 = grant; 0 = deny; N = 3, 002). Because the dependent variable is dichotomous and cert votes by the same justice may be interdependent, I employ a multilevel logistic regression model with random intercepts for justice. The model includes the justices’ SCIPEs for the Big Five (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness), as well as the following control variables and interaction terms:
• The number of amicus curie briefs filed in each case before cert was granted, standardized within the term the case was filed (Amici Attention), as well as an interaction term between this variable and Extraversion.
• Dichotomous indicators for the number of grant votes cast by other justices, as well as interaction terms between each indicator and Agreeableness. I use dichotomous indicators rather than a continuous variable to account for potential nonlinear effects.
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one if the United States asked for review either as petitioner or through participation as amicus curiae and zero otherwise (US Supports Petition), as well as an interaction term between this variable and Neuroticism.
Appendix C - Intra-Court Bargaining Analysis
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 161-166
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Tables C.1–C.5 report the results of the intra-Court bargaining models. The data consist of 48,524 memoranda circulated between the 13 justices who served on the US Supreme Court during the 1969 through 1985 terms. The data were derived from the Burger Court Opinion Writing Database. I conducted separate analyses for the following types of memoranda: majority opinion drafts, separate opinion drafts, opinion suggestions, wait statements, and join statements. The first model, examining majority opinion drafts, includes only the justice in each case who wrote the opinion of the Court (N = 2, 136). The other models include every justice in each case who did not write the opinion of the Court (N = 16, 086). The dependent variables are the number of each memo type sent by each justice in each case; therefore, I used regression models appropriate for count data. To examine majority opinion drafts and wait statements, I employed a multilevel Poisson model with random intercepts for justice, which assumes a Poisson distribution and accounts for potential interdependence between justices. However, a likelihoodratio test indicated overdispersion (suggesting that the Poisson regression model is inappropriate) for separate opinion drafts and opinion suggestions; therefore, I employed a negative binomial regression model for these dependent variables. Additionally, a likelihood-ratio test indicated that I cannot reject the null hypothesis that the multilevel model is not an improvement over the standard model for separate opinion drafts and join statements; therefore, I excluded the random intercepts for justice in these models. All of the models include the justices’ SCIPEs for the Big Five (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness), as well as the following control variables:
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one for the chief justice and zero otherwise (Chief Justice).
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one for justices in their first term on the Court and zero otherwise (Freshman Justice).
• The number of amicus curie briefs filed in each case, standardized within the term the case was filed (Amici Attention).
5 - Opinion Assignments
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 68-87
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In 1947, the US Supreme Court considered a challenge to a New York tax on transportation utilities in Central Greyhound Lines v. Mealey. The State of New York had levied a two percent tax on the gross income of all utilities operating in the state, including common carriers such as Central Greyhound Lines. Because the Constitution delegates to Congress the power to tax interstate commerce, the tax applied only to buses moving within the state of New York; transportation between New York and other states was not subject to the tax. However, the State Tax Commission held that the utilities tax applied to the transportation of passengers between two points in New York even if substantial portions of the transportation utilized highways in other states. Central Greyhound Lines challenged the constitutionality of the tax as applied to a route between two points in New York because 43.53 percent of the route passed through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and therefore might be considered interstate commerce.
In the Court's conference discussion, a majority of justices supported upholding the New York tax, and the opinion of the Court was assigned to Justice Frank Murphy. Majority opinion assignments were rare for Justice Murphy. “Neither [Chief Justice Harlan Fiske] Stone nor [Chief Justice Fred M.] Vinson had much confidence in his work. Accordingly, he received few opinions in important cases from either chief justice”; in fact, the opinion in Central Greyhound had been his “sole assignment to date” during the 1947 term. The other justices viewed him as “lazy and unsophisticated in the law” (Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote to another justice, “[T]he short of the matter is that today you would no more heed Murphy's tripe than you would be seen naked at Dupont Circle at high noon tomorrow”). Murphy “lacked the intellectual drive and the patience to structure the central juridical options of his time,” and he even doubted his own technical competence. Most importantly,Murphy was deficient in the social and leadership skills necessary to persuade his colleagues and marshal the Court: He “seldom spoke in public,”his assets were “all highly personal rather than ‘lawyerly,”’ and “he lacked the charisma, and perhaps the cunning, to build a political coalition capable of sustaining reform movements and of surviving himself.”
List of Figures
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
6 - Intra-Court Bargaining
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 88-108
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When Warren Earl Burger was appointed chief justice in 1969, he had big shoes to fill. Burger's predecessor, Earl Warren (the similarity in names was a coincidence), had earned a prominent reputation for leadership and integrity during his sixteen years on the bench. Dubbed “the super chief” by Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Warren's prestige extended back to the Court's unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education during his first term. Burger was eager to achieve a similar accomplishment early in his tenure. The new chief was known for vanity (“he placed a large cushion on his center seat on the bench, so that he would appear taller than his colleagues”), and he cared a great deal about his public image (he was “deeply hurt by derogatory accounts about his performance” and “always sensitive to what he perceived to be slights to his office and to himself”). Accordingly, the new chief justice hoped to craft a landmark decision that would earn him the sort of clout and prestige that Warren had attained from Brown.
Burger saw his opportunity in another school desegregation case that reached the Court during his second term: Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education. In the Spring of 1970, US District Court Judge James McMillan ordered total desegregation in each of the public schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the surrounding Mecklenburg County. McMillan's order demanded a “racial balance” in each school: Because the district was 71 percent white and 29 percent black, each school was required to strive for that ratio of students. Although McMillan admitted that “variations from the norm may be unavoidable,” his drastic ruling ordered busing for thirteen thousand additional students, which often involved young students spending more than an hour on the bus each day.
Burger felt McMillan's order went well beyond the desegregation ruling in Brown, which only required the end of separate schools for blacks and whites; instead, McMillan's ruling amounted to forced racial mixing – judicially mandated integration as opposed to desegregation. Such an order, in Burger's view, had no legal basis.
7 - Voting on the Merits
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 109-130
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that “in the field of public education, ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” According to some legal experts, the Court's unanimity in Brown was “[s]econd in importance only to what the Supreme Court decided” that day. For example, “[p]opular books and pamphlets supporting the [desegregation] decisions pointed to unanimity as evidence of the legitimacy of the rulings.” But unanimity in Brown was never a foregone conclusion. Just six months earlier, when the Court discussed the Brown case in conference, several justices still opposed a decision mandating desegregation. The clearest opposition came from Justice Stanley F. Reed, “who made it plain … that his views remained what they had been – against closing up Jim Crow schools.”
What happened in the months between the conference discussion and the announcement of the Court's opinion? Why did Justice Reed change his mind and join the majority? Surprisingly, the explanation most commonly offered by historians, biographers, and legal scholars has little to do with constitutional law or politics. Justice Reed did not experience an ideological transformation, nor was he convinced by a legal argument. Instead, the most prominent accounts of Reed's evolution in Brown suggest that Chief Justice Warren persuaded him to change his vote through a steady dialogue that included frequent lunches between the would-be dissenter, the chief justice, and Warren's ally, Justice Harold H. Burton. Eventually, Warren coaxed Reed into joining the majority by appealing to his sense of duty.
Justice Reed was a “conscientious, hard-working jurist, conservative by temperament and respectful of precedent.” He was known as an “incredibly methodical” and “prodigious worker, laboring often at night.” And Reed's “conscientious manner” also included a strong sense of duty. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once put it, “Reed was a soldier and glad to do anything that the interest of the Court might require.”
Never was Reed's devotion to the Court more important than in Brown. “Because he was a Southerner, even a lone dissent by him would give a lot of people a lot of grist for making trouble.”
1 - Who They Are and What They Want
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 1-12
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On November 1, 1962, Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Charles Lee Buxton, the head of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University, opened a clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. The clinic was one of several that Planned Parenthood had opened in Connecticut over the prior few decades. Like the other clinics, this one's purpose was to provide birth control information to married couples and dispense contraceptives to married women.
Within days of opening the clinic, Griswold and Buxton were arrested for violating an 1879 Connecticut statute, which prohibited any person from using “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” Violators could be fined or imprisoned for up to a year, and Connecticut law stated that “[a]ny person who assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principal offender.” Griswold and Buxton were found guilty as accessories to violating the anti-contraceptive statute and fined $100 each. The Appellate Division of the Circuit Court and the Supreme Court of Errors in Connecticut both affirmed their convictions, so Griswold and Buxton appealed their case to the US Supreme Court.
When Griswold and Buxton opened the clinic in New Haven, they were well aware of the anti-contraceptive statute. In fact, one of their goals in opening the clinic was to provoke a legal action that would allow them to challenge the archaic Connecticut law. Though once fairly common in the United States, Connecticut's 82-year-old ban on contraceptives was one of only two such laws still in place in 1961. In the preceding decades, several doctors and patients had brought challenges to the law, but those challenges had failed on procedural grounds. In the most recent case, Poe v. Ulman, Buxton and his patients had asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the statute, but their lawsuit was deemed unripe because the law had not actually been enforced against them. With their arrest and conviction, Griswold and Buxton were now positioned to directly challenge the constitutionality of the anti-contraceptive law.
Appendix E - Separate Opinion Analysis
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 171-174
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Table E.1 reports the results of the concurrence model. The data for the concurrence model consist of decisions by 34 justices in 7,473 cases during the 1946 through 2015 terms. The dependent variable is each justice's decision to file a concurring opinion (1 = concurring opinion; 0 = no concurring opinion; N = 39, 793). Unless noted otherwise, the data were derived from the Supreme Court Database. Because the dependent variable is dichotomous and separate opinions by the same justice may be interdependent, I employ a multilevel logistic regression model with random intercepts for justice. The model includes the justices’ SCIPEs for the Big Five (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness), the SCIPEs for the majority opinion author (OA Extraversion, OA Conscientiousness, OA Agreeableness, OA Neuroticism, and OA Openness), and the following control variables:
• The number of amicus curie briefs filed in each case, standardized within the term the case was filed (Amici Attention), as well as an interaction term between this variable and Extraversion.
• Each justice's ideological disagreement with the direction of the Court's ruling (Justice Disagreement), measured as the justice's Segal–Cover ideology score if the Court issued a liberal ruling and the inverted Segal–Cover score if the Court issued a conservative ruling, as well as an interaction term between this variable and Conscientiousness.
• A dichotomous indicator for cases in which the Court issued a liberal ruling (Liberal Ruling), as well as an interaction term between this variable and Agreeableness.
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one for the chief justice and zero otherwise (Chief Justice).
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one for justices in their first term on the Court and zero otherwise (Freshman Justice).
• The score that resulted from a factor analysis of the number of legal issues raised and the number of legal provisions at issue in the case (Case Complexity).
Appendix D - Voting on the Merits Analysis
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 167-170
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Table D.1 reports the results of the dissent model. The data consist of votes on the merits by 34 justices in 6,222 cases during the 1951 through 2013 terms. Unless noted otherwise, the data were obtained from the Supreme Court Database. The dependent variable is each justice's vote on the merits in each case (1 = dissent, 0 = vote with majority; N = 49, 001). Because the dependent variable is dichotomous and dissents by the same justice may be interdependent, I employ a multilevel logistic regression model with random intercepts for justice. The model includes the justices’ SCIPEs for the Big Five (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness), the SCIPEs for the majority opinion author (OA Extraversion, OA Conscientiousness, OA Agreeableness, OA Neuroticism, and OA Openness), and the following control variables and interaction terms:
• The public's ideological disagreement with the direction of the Court's ruling (Public Disagreement), measured as the Stimson Public Mood if the Court issued a conservative ruling and the inverted Stimson Public Mood if the Court issued a liberal ruling.
• The Clark, Lax, and Rice measure of latent case salience, which is based on pre-decision case coverage in three leading newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as a three-way interaction term between this variable, Public Disagreement, and Extraversion (and the constituent two-way interactions).
• Each justice's ideological disagreement with the direction of the Court's ruling (Justice Disagreement), measured as the justice's Segal–Cover ideology score if the Court issued a liberal ruling and the inverted Segal–Cover score if the Court issued a conservative ruling, as well as an interaction term between this variable and Conscientiousness.
• Dichotomous indicators taking on the value one for cases with 1Other Dissent, 2 Other Dissents, and 3 Other Dissents (zero otherwise), as well as interaction terms between each of these indicators and Agreeableness.
• A dichotomous indicator taking on the value one if the Court issued a liberal ruling and zero otherwise (Liberal Ruling), as well as an interaction term between this variable and Agreeableness.
Notes
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp 175-204
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Frontmatter
- Matthew E. K. Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
-
- Book:
- What Justices Want
- Published online:
- 22 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2018, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation