Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T06:20:52.025Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rule Creation in a Political Hierarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA  and
TOM S. CLARK
CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA*
Affiliation:
Emory University
TOM S. CLARK*
Affiliation:
Emory University
*
Clifford J. Carrubba is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, 327 Tarbutton Hall, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).
Tom S. Clark is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, 327 Tarbutton Hall, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Principal-agent relations are replete in politics; politicians are agents of electorates, bureaucrats are agents of executives, lower courts are agents of upper courts, and much more. Commonly, principals are modeled as the rule-making body and agents as the rule-implementing body. However, principals often delegate the authority to make the rules themselves to their agents. The relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court is one such example; a considerable portion of the law (rules) is made in the lower federal courts with the Supreme Court serving primarily as the overseer of those lower courts’ decisions. In this article, we develop and test a principal-agent model of law (rule) creation in a judicial hierarchy. The model yields new insights about the relationship among various features of the judicial hierarchy that run against many existing perceptions. For example, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the divergence in upper and lower court preferences over rules and the likelihood of review and reversal by the Supreme Court. The empirical evidence supports these derived relationships. Wider implications for the principal-agent literature are also discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 106 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 622 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2012

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.)

References

REFERENCES

Beim, Deborah, and Kastellec, Jonathan P.. 2011. “Strategic Dissents in the Judicial Hierarchy: Theory and Evidence from Death Penalty Cases.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle.Google Scholar
Caldeira, Greg A., Wright, John R., and Zorn, Christopher J. W.. 1999. “Sophisticated Voting and Gate-keeping in the Supreme Court.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 15: 549–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Charles M., Segal, Jeffrey A., and Songer, Donald R.. 2000. “Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court's Certiorari Decisions.” American Political Science Review 94: 101–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S. 2009. “A Principal-Agent Model of en Banc Review.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 25 (1): 55–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Carrubba, Clifford J.. 2012. “A Theory of Opinion Writing in the Judicial Hierarchy.” Journal of Politics 74 (2): 584–603.Google Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Lauderdale, Benjamin. 2010. “Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 871–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Strauss, Aaron B.. 2010. “The Implications of High Court Docket Control for Resource Allocation and Legal Efficiency.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 22 (2): 247–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cross, Frank B. 2005. “Appellate Court Adherence to Precedent.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 2: 369–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee, Martin, Andrew D., Segal, Jeffrey A., and Westerland, Chad. 2007. “The Judicial Common Space.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 23 (2): 303–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Barry. 2006. “Taking Law Seriously.” Perspectives on Politics 4 (2): 261–76.Google Scholar
Giles, Michael W., Hettinger, Virginia A., and Peppers, Todd. 2002. Measuring the Preferences of Federal Judges: Alternatives to Party of the Appointing President. Emory University. Working paper.Google Scholar
Greene, William H. 2003. Econometric Analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Haire, Susan B., Songer, Donald R., and Lindquist, Stefanie A.. 2003. “Appellate Court Supervision in the Federal Judiciary: A Hierarchical Perspective.” Law and Society Review 37 (1): 143–68.Google Scholar
Hammond, Thomas H., Bonneau, Chris W., and Sheehan, Reginald S.. 2006. Institutional Games and the U.S. Supreme Court. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Hettinger, Virginia A., Lindquist, Stephanie A., and Martinek, Wendy L.. 2004. “Comparing Attitudinal and Strategic Accounts of Dissenting Behavior on the U.S. Courts of Appeals.” American Journal of Political Science 48: 123–37.Google Scholar
Hettinger, Virginia A., Lindquist, Virginia A., and Martinek, Wendy L.. 2006. Judging on a Collegial Court: Influences on Federal Appellate Decision Making. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Jacobi, Tonja, and Tiller, Emerson H.. 2007. “Legal Doctrine and Political Control.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 23 (2): 326–45.Google Scholar
Kastellec, Jonathan P. 2007. “Panel Composition and Judicial Compliance on the United States Courts of Appeals.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 23 (2): 421–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, David E. 2002. Making Law in the United States Courts of Appeal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, David E., and Hume, Robert J.. 2003. “Fear of Reversal as an Explanation of Lower Court Compliance.” Law and Society Review 37 (3): 579–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornhauser, Lewis A. 1992. “Modeling Collegial Courts II: Legal Doctrine.” Journal of Law Economics and Organization 8: 441–70.Google Scholar
Lax, Jeffrey R. 2007. “Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts.” American Political Science Review 101 (3): 591–604.Google Scholar
Lax, Jeffrey R. 2009. Political Constraints on Legal Doctrine: How Hierarchy Shapes the Law. Columbia University Working paper.Google Scholar
Lax, Jeffrey R. 2011. “The New Judicial Politics of Legal Doctrine.” Annual Review of Political Science 14: 131–57.Google Scholar
Lindquist, Stefanie A., Haire, Susan B., and Songer, Donald R.. 2007. “Supreme Court Auditing of the U.S. Courts of Appeals: An Organizational Perspective.” Journal of Public Administration Research Theory 17 (4): 607–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Andrew D., and Quinn, Kevin M.. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999.” Political Analysis 10 (2): 134–53.Google Scholar
McGuire, Kevin T., Vanberg, Georg, Smith, Charles E. Jr., and Caldeira, Gregory A.. 2009. “Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Politics 71 (4): 1305–21.Google Scholar
McNollgast. 1995. “Politics and the Courts: A Positive Theory of Judicial Doctrine and the Rule of Law.” Southern California Law Review 68: 1631–89.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
Posner, Richard A. 1995. Overcoming Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Staton, Jeffrey K., and Vanberg, Georg. 2008. “The Value of Vagueness: Delegation, Defiance, and Judicial Opinions.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (3): 504–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tiller, Emerson H., and Spiller, Pablo T.. 1999. “Strategic Instruments: Legal Structue and Political Games in Administrative Law.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 15 (2): 349–77.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.