Judicial Policy: Change Over Time

Abstract

My interest in understanding why courts change their policy output over time led me to a particular concept-public opinion; a particular method-path analysis; and a representative model simplified from reality to a few linkages. For this purpose I used Vietnam mistake polls from 1965 to 1973 and the universe of draft cases decided between 1967 and 1975, aggregated by nation, region, and state, in longitudinal analyses (Cook, 1977).1 Public opinion proved to be a powerful predictor of change in judicial policy over time. Kritzer (1974, 1978) tries to explain variation among individual sentences by entering many systemic and case level variables into a regression equation, without respect to the time dimension. His data base is a nonrandom sample of draft resister cases, 7.7 percent of the universe. No single indicator of environment including state opinion explained much variation in individual sentences in his cross-sectional analyses (1978, Tables 2,4). I replicated the cross-sectional analysis with the universe of cases within each year and reported that public opinion across states does not correlate with aggregated district sentences (1977, p. 571, fn. 1), the same result that Kritzer shows in Table lb.2 My contention that the over time relationship between public opinion and court output is strong is fully supported by his replications on Tables la and 3 (national opinion column). Among the simple correlations which I report (1977, Table 2) are .957 between national opinion and sentencing; .942 between Eastern opinion and output; and .896 between New Jersey opinion and output.3 When the over time analysis also includes

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