Measuring the Significance of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

Despite general agreement that Supreme Court decisions are not fungible, no significance variable satisfactory to the judicial behavior subfield has been produced. In this study the concepts of political, legal, and historical significance are differentiated, and a political significance variable is created by factor analyzing the case choices of 15 authorities. The methods conventionally used to identify significant cases are evaluated by comparing their results to the list of politically significant cases generated here. The descriptive value of the new measure lies in finding the proportion of significant cases by term and identifying their opinion authors and its predictive value in the replication and revision of models and propositions explaining judicial behavior.

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