U.s. Courts Of Special Jurisdiction
Even if the impact of the opinion author could possibly be obscured to some extent by different majority coalition Justices, our analysis controls for this chance in two ways. Second, we include a variable for the ideological homogeneity of the Justices within the majority opinion coalition of the precedent (labeled as Homogeneity). By controlling for these variables, the outcomes we discover for every Justice are prone to be a conservative estimate of a Justice’s influence on the law. Suppose Justice Brennan had an authentically greater opinion-writing effect than his fellow Justices of the era. To the degree that those Justices influenced his opinion, or he theirs, that effect would trigger our procedure to understate the facility of Justice Brennan’s pen.
Justice Ginsburg was quite high for predicted Supreme Court citations (with statistical significance) but remarkably low for predicted circuit court docket citations (once more with statistical significance). The variations among the Justices on the legal relevance rating measure are comparatively slight, when compared with citations. Only Justices Frankfurter, Murphy, Jackson, Rutledge, and Whittaker are statistically significantly different from the mean. The latter three have comparatively few opinions within the knowledge, and the results could also be an artifact of a novel set of instances that was included within the evaluation.
The significance of this impact is modified, although, by the Chief Justice’s need to balance other targets, similar to Court concord. See Forrest Maltzman & Paul J. Wahlbeck, A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on … Read More
