Case No. 19-1438: Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board V. Abraham K. Watkins
Constitutional decisions, against this, cannot be reversed by the legislature. If the Court will get a constitutional opinion mistaken, there may be much much less possibility for democratic correction. This position has a pedigree within the earliest opinions of the Court.
We attempt to piece out the assorted components which will drive the significance of a Supreme Court opinion and uncover to what extent the opinion itself matters (as opposed to immutable exterior circumstances). We consider intrinsic case traits, age, options of the opinion itself, and management variables to evaluate the determinants of opinion importance by our measures. Although these opinions had been recognized in the books’ lists as essential ones, none has explicit renown.
However, very recent opinions could have had little alternative for quotation, so that they would seem to score low on quotation measures, even when they might finally prove to be very vital. As a outcome, the significance of opinions within the network of precedent will rely in part upon how old they are. This variable is captured by counting the variety of authorized issues and the variety of legal provisions at concern in a case in the Supreme Court Database. The accuracy of the authorized problem coding for the Database has seen problem. This concept about the greater force of statutory opinions (or those of other authorized areas) has only been hypothesized, although, and by no means subjected to empirical scrutiny.
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