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Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Tom S. Clark ,
Jeffrey R. Lax  and
Douglas Rice
Tom S. Clark
Affiliation:
Emory University
Jeffrey R. Lax
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Douglas Rice*
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
*
Contact the corresponding author, Douglas Rice, at drrice@olemiss.edu.
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Abstract

While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but decisions themselves are an act of judicial politics. Because this coverage measure is affected only after a decision is announced, using it limits the types of inferences we can draw about salience. We develop a measure of latent salience, one that builds on existing work, but that also explicitly incorporates and models predecision information. This measure has the potential to ameliorate concerns of causal inference, put research findings on sounder footing, and add to our understanding of judicial behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 2015 , pp. 37 - 65
Copyright
© 2015 by Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We are indebted to many research assistants who over the years helped us collect initial data for this project, many of whom, we can only infer, perished in the process. We thank Charles Cameron, Lee Epstein, Matthew Hall, John Kastellec, Ben Lauderdale, Drew Linzer, Kelly Rader, Phil Schrodt, and Chris Zorn for helpful comments and discussions.

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