What are the causes and consequences of legal development? In recent years scholars have begun to address these challenging questions, yet there is still much work to be done. The intermediate level of the federal court system (a.k.a., circuit courts) provides an institutional context replete with opportunities to extend our theoretical and empirical understanding of legal development. This project takes advantage of these opportunities in three ways. The first component is an examination of the impact of circuit courts on state policy diffusion. Data on the adoption and content of state legislation regarding medical procedures, election law, and family law will shed light on the intersection of federal constitutional case law and the development of state law. The central claim is that state legislators will be more heavily influenced by other states under the jurisdiction of the same federal circuit when legislation has potential federal implications. The second and third segments of this project leverage circuit judges' citation to precedent in search and seizure cases over the last twenty years in order to gain insight into the extent to which law and the structure of legal institutions influence judicial behavior. A circuit court precedent is binding in its own circuit, but merely persuasive in other circuits. Consequently, the effect of ideology on how a precedent is treated should be significantly less when it is considered in its own circuit than when considered by a sister circuit. Moreover, the nuances of a circuit's citation to its own binding precedent are likely to be influenced by strategic anticipation of whether a case will be reviewed and overturned by the entire circuit. Empirical testing of both of these expectations will contribute to further understanding of how an important institution, the federal court system, both influences and is influenced by legal development.
With regard to broader impact, this project will contribute to the training of a graduate student. In addition, public debates concerning the courts address the significance of judicial ideology. This project will contribute to providing information concerning the complexity of judicial decisionmaking and influence to the public debate.
Courts play an important role within our governmental structure. Their importance is most frequently illustrated through the widespread impact of landmark cases handed down by the United States Supreme Court. A considerable amount of power is also wielded by the intermediate appeals courts in the federal court system—federal circuit courts. This project consists of three separate investigations into federal circuit court power. The first part of this project locates objective evidence that legal rules constrain how judges make decisions. Many scholars claim that even though judges are supposed to comply with past cases, there are so many possible cases to use that judges can just select the ones that allow them to rule the way they prefer based on their personal political ideology. Even if this claim is false, it is difficult to disprove. My approach is to compare how judges use past cases (called precedents) when they are required to with when they are not. If judges are always disregarding the rules and secretly deciding cases in accordance with their own ideology, there should be no difference in whether and how they use precedents that are binding (which they are required to use under legal rules) and not binding. After collecting and analyzing data from over fifteen thousand cases dating from 1953 to 2010, I uncover evidence that legal rules do change judge’s behavior. With any precedent, a judge writing an opinion is more likely to talk about the precedent when it is something she agrees with. However, that relationship is much stronger when legal rules say a judge is not required to rely upon the precedent. Also, judges are less likely to be critical of a precedent that they are legally bound to apply. These findings show that even though federal circuit judges have a lot of discretion, their actions are constrained by legal rules. The second issue I examine is also related to how judges use precedent. Almost all circuit cases are decided by a group of three judges working together (called a panel), but each circuit has several judges and they can potentially review cases as a group. As a result, even when three circuit judges who all have similar outlooks serve together on a panel, they might be careful to not do anything that the group as a whole would look upon with disapproval. I examine whether there is evidence that when a judge working on a panel writes an opinion, he decides what precedents to include and how to discuss them based on what the group as a whole might prefer. There is evidence that this happens. Even if the judge writing the opinion doesn’t agree with a precedent, if the majority of the group of judges does agree with the precedent, then the author will be more likely to discuss it. This provides evidence that all the judges in a circuit can subtly influence all the cases, not just the cases they hear or the opinions they write themselves. The third issue I explore is whether state lawmakers pay attention to how federal appellate courts have ruled when they write laws in areas that might infringe on constitutional rights. Here I look at the influence of the Supreme Court as well as circuit courts. My study focuses on laws regulating abortion from all 50 states between 1973 and 2010. First, I collect information on all the federal appellate court cases the ruled on these laws and declared them either constitutional or unconstitutional. The results show that this information is related both to whether state lawmakers decide to pass such a law at all, and, if they pass it, how they write the law itself. When state lawmakers are considering passing a law, they frequently consider whether other states have a similar kind of law and how well other such laws have worked out. If other laws exist in the case of abortion regulations, one piece of information later state lawmakers (in other states) use is what has happened in the federal courts. The more laws there are that have been struck down as unconstitutional, the less likely other states are to pass such a law while court rulings finding previous laws constitutional have the opposite effect. Moreover, I go beyond simply looking at whether a law was adopted and examine the text of each new law to see whether it borrows phrasing from currently existing laws. This analysis shows that when a state decides to pass a law, they borrow more phrasing from previous laws that courts have already declared constitutional and less from those declared unconstitutional. These results illustrate that the power of federal courts, including circuit courts as well as the Supreme Court, extends to influence the development of policy at the state level.
