Jurisprudential Regimes in Supreme Court Decision Making

We theorize that if law matters in Supreme Court decision making, it matters not as a mechanistic force that dictates decisions, but as an institutional construct created by justices who possess political attitudes. Jurisprudential regimes identify relevant case factors and/or set the level of scrut...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 2002-06, Vol.96 (2), p.305-320
Main Authors: RICHARDS, MARK J., KRITZER, HERBERT M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Changes
Court Litigation
Courts
Criminal justice
Decision making
First Amendment
Government regulation
Governmental Structure
Influence
Institutional Role
Judges
Judges & magistrates
Judicial Decisions
Jurisprudence
Justice
Labor regulations
Law
Lower courts
Political Attitudes
Political institutions
Political Issues
Political regimes
Political science
Political systems
Pornography & obscenity
Preferences
Search & seizure
Supreme Court
Supreme Court decisions
Supreme Court justices
Tenure
U.S.A
United States Supreme Court
United States Supreme Court opinions
Voting
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:We theorize that if law matters in Supreme Court decision making, it matters not as a mechanistic force that dictates decisions, but as an institutional construct created by justices who possess political attitudes. Jurisprudential regimes identify relevant case factors and/or set the level of scrutiny or balancing the justices will use. These jurisprudential regimes have the potential to make a significant difference in the decisions of the justices. We identify a candidate jurisprudential regime, content-neutrality, which appears to govern the general area of free expression law. The Court applies the strictest standard of review to regulations of expression that target the content or viewpoint of expression. Relying on a series of statistical tests using logistic regression, we find that the justices take seriously this jurisprudential regime.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055402000187