Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m8s7h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T01:49:12.286Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agenda Setting and Attention to Precedent in the US Federal Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

JBrandon Duck-Mayr ,
Thomas G. Hansford  and
James F. Spriggs II
James F. Spriggs II
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

To what degree is judicial agenda setting top-down or bottom-up? Existing studies lack evidence of the frequency or magnitude of these two processes. We conceptualize the judicial agenda as the legal questions/rules receiving judicial attention, measure it using citations to Supreme Court opinions, and estimate vector autoregression models to identify how each level of court initiates or responds to variation in attention to precedent at other levels of the judiciary. The Supreme Court exerts some top-down control, but agenda setting is more often bottom-up, revealing lower courts are more integral to setting the federal judicial agenda than previously understood.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 233 - 260
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Spriggs recognizes funding from the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Science, SES-0550451). A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2013 annual conference of the American Political Science Association. Contact the corresponding author, James F. Spriggs II, at jspriggs@wustl.edu.

References

Aldisert, Rugero J. 1990. “Precedent: What It Is and What It Isn’t; When Do We Kiss It and When Do We Kill It?” Pepperdine Law Review 17:605–36.Google Scholar
Baird, Vanessa A. 2004. “The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda.” Journal of Politics 66 (3): 755–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, Lawrence. 1980. “Response of Federal District Judges to Court of Appeals Policies: An Exploration.” Western Political Quarterly 33 (2): 217–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benesh, Sara C., and Malia Reddick. 2002. “Overruled: An Event History Analysis of Lower Court Reaction to Supreme Court Alteration of Precedent.” Journal of Politics 64 (2): 534–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Betancourt, Michael. 2017. “A Conceptual Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan C., and Christina L. Boyd. 2013. “Selecting the Select Few: The Discuss List and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda-Setting Process.” Social Science Quarterly 94 (4): 1124–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan C., and Ryan J. Owens. 2009. “Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence.” Journal of Politics 71 (3): 1062–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan C. 2012. “Consider the Source (and the Message): Supreme Court Justices and Strategic Audits of Lower Court Decisions.” Political Research Quarterly 65 (2): 385–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan C., and James F. Spriggs II. 2013. “The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 10 (2): 325–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandt, Patrick T., and Todd Sandler. 2012. “A Bayesian Poisson Vector Autoregression Model.” Political Analysis 20 (3): 292–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandt, Patrick T., and John T. Williams. 2001. “A Linear Poisson Autoregressive Model: The Poisson Ar(p) Model.” Political Analysis 9 (2): 164–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandt, Patrick T., John T. Williams, Benjamin O. Fordham, and Brian Pollins. 2000. “Dynamic Modeling for Persistent Even Count Time Series.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (4): 823–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryan, Amanda C. 2019. “Public Opinion and Setting the Agenda on the U.S. Supreme Court.” American Politics Research. 48 (3): 377–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A., and John R. Wright. 1988. “Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court.” American Political Science Review 82 (4): 1109–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A. 1990. “The Discuss List: Agenda Building in the United States Supreme Court.” Law and Society Review 24 (3): 807–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Charles M., Jeffrey A. Segal, and Donald Songer. 2000. “Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Decisions.” American Political Science Review 94 (1): 101–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrubba, Clifford J., Barry Friedman, Andrew D. Martin, and Georg Vanberg. 2012. “Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?” American Journal of Political Science 56 (2): 400–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Jonathan Kastellec. 2013. “The Supreme Court and Percolation in the Lower Courts: An Optimal Stopping Model.” Journal of Politics 75 (1): 150–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Benjamin Lauderdale. 2010. “Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 871–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corley, Pamela C., Paul M. Collins Jr., and Bryan Calvin. 2011. “Lower Court Influence on U.S. Supreme Court Opinion Content.” Journal of Politics 73 (1): 31–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cross, Frank B., and James F. Spriggs II. 2010. “The Most Important (and Best) Supreme Court Options and Justices.” Emory Law Journal 60 (2): 407–502.Google Scholar
Cross, Frank B., James F. Spriggs II, Timothy R. Johnson, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 2010. “Citations in the U.S. Supreme Court: An Empirical Study of Their Use and Significance.” University of Illinois Law Review 2010 (2): 489–575.Google Scholar
Eichler, Michael. 2013. “Causal Inference with Multiple Time Series: Principles and Problems.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 371:20110613. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2011.0613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epp, Charles R. 1998. The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee, and Joseph F. Kobylka. 1992. The Supreme Court and Legal Change: Abortion and the Death Penalty. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Flemming, Roy B., John Bohte, and B. Dan Wood. 1997. “One Voice among Many: The Supreme Court’s Influence on Attentiveness to Issues in the United States, 1947–1990.” American Journal of Political Science 41 (4): 1224–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flemming, Roy B., B. Dan Wood, and John Bohte. 1999. “Policy Attention in a System of Separated Powers: The Dynamics of American Agenda Setting.” Journal of Politics 61 (1): 76–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, James H., Timothy R. Johnson, James F. Spriggs II, Sangik Jeon, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 2007. “Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court.” Political Analysis 15 (3): 324–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, John R., John T. Williams, and Tse-min Lin. 1989. “Vector Autoregression and the Study of Politics.” American Journal of Political Science 33 (4): 842–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Sheldon. 1975. “Voting Behavior on the United States Courts of Appeals Revisited.” American Political Science Review 69 (2): 491–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haire, Susan B., Donald R. Songer, and Stefanie Lindquist. 2003. “Appellate Court Supervision in the Federal Judiciary: A Hierarchical Perspective.” Law and Society Review 37 (1): 143–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansford, Thomas G., and James F. Spriggs II. 2006. The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansford, Thomas G., James F. Spriggs II, and Anthony A. Stenger. 2013. “Informational Dynamics of Vertical Stare Decisis.” Journal of Politics 75 (4): 894–906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, Anna, and Barry Friedman. 2009. “Ducking Trouble: Congressionally Induced Selection Bias in the Supreme Court’s Agenda.” Journal of Politics 71 (2): 574–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurwitz, Mark S. 2006. “Institutional Arrangements and the Dynamics of Agenda Formation in the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals.” Law and Policy 28 (3): 321–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary. 1988. “Statistical Models for Political Science Event Counts: Bias in Conventional Procedures and Evidence for the Exponential Poisson Regression Model.” American Journal of Political Science 32 (3): 838–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingdon, John W. 1984. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Klein, David E. 2002. Making Law in the United States Courts of Appeal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landes, William M., and Richard A. Posner. 1976. “Legal Precedent: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.” Journal of Law and Economics 19 (August): 249–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Andrew D., and Kevin M. Quinn. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the United States Supreme Court, 1953–1999.” Political Analysis 10 (2): 134–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, Ryan J. 2010. “The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (2): 412–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pacelle, Richard L. 1991. The Transformation of the Supreme Court’s Agenda: From the New Deal to the Reagan Administration. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Perry, H. W., Jr. 1991. Deciding to Decide: Agenda Setting in the United States Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, C. Scott. 2007. “Getting Attention: The Effect of Legal Mobilization on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Attention to Issues.” Political Research Quarterly 60 (3): 561–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plummer, Martyn. 2016. Rjags: Bayesian Graphical Models Using Mcmc. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rjags.X.Google Scholar
Plummer, Martyn. 2017. JAGS Version 4.3.0 User Manual. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcmc-jags/files/Manuals/4.x/jags_user_manual.pdf/download.X.Google Scholar
Randazzo, Kirk A. 2008. “Strategic Anticipation and the Hierarchy of Justice in U.S. District Courts.” American Politics Research 36 (5): 669–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. 2018. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.X.Google Scholar
Rice, Douglas. 2014. “The Impact of Supreme Court Activity on the Judicial Agenda.” Law and Society Review 48 (1): 63–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riker, William H. 1993. Agenda Formation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schattschneider, E. E. 1960. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Reinhart, & Winston.Google Scholar
Schauer, Frederick. 1987. “Precedent.” Stanford Law Review 39 (3): 571–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey A, and Robert M. Howard. 2002. “How the Supreme Court Justices Respond to Requests to Overturn Precedent.” Judicature 85:148–57.Google Scholar
Songer, Donald R., Jeffrey A. Segal, and Charles M. Cameron. 1994. “The Hierarchy of Justice: Testing a Principal-Agent Model of Supreme Court–Circuit Court Interactions.” American Journal of Political Science 38 (3): 673–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spriggs, James F., II, and Thomas G. Hansford. 2000. “Measuring Legal Change: The Reliability and Validity of Shepard’s Citations.” Political Research Quarterly 53 (2): 327–41.Google Scholar
Spriggs, James F., II, and Thomas G. Hansford. 2002. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s Incorporation and Interpretation of Precedent.” Law and Society Review 36 (1): 401–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tanenhaus, Joseph, Marvin Schick, Matthew Muraskin, and Daniel Rosen. 1963. “The Supreme Court’s Certiorari Jurisdiction: Cue Theory.” In Judicial Decision Making, ed. Glendon Schubert. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Westerland, Chad, Jeffrey A. Segal, Lee Epstein, Charles M. Cameron, and Scott Comparato. 2010. “Strategic Defiance and Compliance in the U.S. Courts of Appeals.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 891–905.CrossRefGoogle Scholar