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Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Compliance with Supreme Court Decisions: A Question of Causality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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In their essay, Tom Tyler and Ken Rasinski take issue with my analysis of legitimacy and procedural justice. Although my article covered a fair number of different issues, their critique focuses on one particular conclusion. I argued that citizen perceptions of procedural fairness by the U.S. Supreme Court contributed little to the willingness of citizens to comply with unpopular court decisions. Instead, compliance (or acquiescence) was most likely when citizens accorded high levels of diffuse support to the Supreme Court. That is, those who viewed the Supreme Court as a more legitimate institution were more likely to accede to an unpopular decision. I concluded (1989:489): “Thus there is some evidence that the legitimacy of the Court, at least as reflected in levels of diffuse support, affects compliance with unpopular decisons. No such evidence exists for perceptions of procedural justice.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

References

CALDEIRA, Gregory A., and James L., GIBSON (forthcoming) “The Etiology of Public Support for the Supreme Court,” American Journal of Political Science.Google Scholar
GIBSON, James L. (1989) “Understandings of Justice: Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Political Tolerance,” 23 Law & Society Review 469.Google Scholar
GIBSON, James L., and Gregory A., CALDEIRA (forthcoming) “Blacks and the United States Supreme Court: Models of Diffuse Support,” Journal of Politics.Google Scholar
LAU, Richard R., and David O., SEARS (1986) “Social Cognition and Political Cognition: The Past, the Present, and the Future,” in Lau, R. R. and Sears, D. O. (eds.), Political Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar