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Does the Lawyer Matter? Influencing Outcomes on the Supreme Court of Canada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

John Szmer ,
Susan W. Johnson  and
Tammy A. Sarver
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Abstract

This article examines the impact of lawyer capability on the decisionmaking of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). Extending prior attorney capability studies of U.S. judicial decisionmaking, we test three lawyer variables: prior litigation experience, litigation team size, and Queen's Counsel designation. We find that the first two variables have a statistically significant and positive relationship with the SCC's decisions in non-reference-question cases from 1988 to 2000. Moreover, this relationship persists even after controlling for party capability, issue area, and judicial policy preferences.

Information

Type
Convincing the Court: Two Studies of Advocacy
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 279 - 303
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Donald Songer, Susan Haire, Cynthia Combs, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. In particular, the suggestions by the editor, Herbert Kritzer, were invaluable, and led to significant improvements in the quality of the article. As always, any errors herein are solely the work product of the authors.

References

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