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Confessions at the Supreme Court: Judicial Response to Solicitor General Error

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Jessica A. Schoenherr  and
Nicholas W. Waterbury
Jessica A. Schoenherr*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina, USA
Nicholas W. Waterbury
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
*
Contact the corresponding author, Jessica A. Schoenherr, at [email protected].
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Abstract

As the chief litigator for the US government, the solicitor general plays a crucial role in the Supreme Court decision-making process. The justices and solicitor general share a mutually beneficial relationship that is reinforced by the solicitor general’s willingness to provide legal advice when asked. In this article, we examine whether and how this relationship changes when the solicitor general files a formal “confession of error.” Using data on confessions filed between the 1979 and 2014 terms, we find the justices are significantly less likely to support the solicitor general’s position at multiple stages of the Court’s decision-making process if the solicitor general confesses error in light of a policy change. This punishment is harshest when the solicitor general provides advice as an amicus curiae participant, but it is only temporary. These results provide new insight into the scope and limitations of benefits allotted to the Court’s “tenth justice.”

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 13 - 36
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Originally prepared for the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. We thank Aaron-Andrew Bruhl, Ryan Owens, and Patrick Wohlfarth for sharing their data. We also thank Ryan Black, Josh Boston, Tim Johnson, Jonathan King, Elizabeth Lane, Jeff Segal, Cory Smidt, and our anonymous reviewers for their help on multiple iterations of this project. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DWBQ38.

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