The Influence of Stare Decisis on the Votes of United States Supreme Court Justices

Jeffrey A. Segal · Harold J. Spaeth

199 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Political Science

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Judicial and Constitutional Studies Legal processes and jurisprudence American Constitutional Law and Politics

Abstract

Theory: We test arguments from the legal model claiming that United States Supreme Court justices will follow previously established legal rules even when they disagree with them; i.e., that they are influenced by stare decisis. Hypothesis: Because of the institutional features facing Supreme Court justices, we argue that justices who dissent from or otherwise disagree with Supreme Court precedents established in landmark cases are free not to support those decisions in subsequent cases. Methods: A systematic content analysis of the votes and opinions of dissenting Supreme Court justices in a random sample of landmark decisions and their progeny. Results: Overwhelmingly, Supreme Court justices are not influenced by landmark precedents with which they disagree. We replicate the research for nonlandmark decisions and find similar results. Alone among the justices studied, only Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell show any systematic support for stare decisis at all.

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References

1977Taking Rights Seriously 1993The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model 1922The Nature of the Judicial Process 1994The Hierarchy of Justice: Testing a Principal-Agent Model of Supreme Court-Circuit Court Interactions 1992On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision Making 1992A positive theory of statutory interpretation 1993The Supreme Court and legal change: abortion and the death penalty

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2017A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States 2001What's Law Got to Do with It? Judicial Behavioralists Test the “Legal Model” of Judicial Decision Making 1996The Norm of Stare Decisis 2009Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence 2003Comparing Attitudinal and Strategic Accounts of Dissenting Behavior on the U.S. Courts of Appeals 2014International Courts and the Performance of International Agreements: A General Theory with Evidence from the European Union

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