Collaborative Research: Precedent-Altering Opinions and Collegiality on the Supreme Court

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the role judicial collegiality plays in the Supreme Court decision-making process, with a particular focus on how relationships shift when the Court uses its most significant powers of altering past decisions and overturning acts of Congress. Like many Americans, Supreme Court justices go to work everyday and, for a multitude of reasons, work amiably with their colleagues and show respect for their views and positions. Collegiality is the key to any functioning workplace, but it is especially important at the Supreme Court, where the justices regularly engage with each other to resolve the difficult questions that color the Court’s docket. Yet the Supreme Court is empowered to alter the legal status quo by reviewing acts of Congress or reconsidering its own past decisions, and that power stands to make collegiality the most and least important factor in the judicial decision-making process. Investigating these relationships requires collecting past judicial communications and using those papers to study judicial collegiality. By collecting, digitizing, and analyzing data from the Rehnquist Court, this project will enhance scholarly understanding of the role of collegiality at the Supreme Court while simultaneously creating a data source that scholars can use to study wide swaths of the otherwise-private Supreme Court decision-making process. After the analysis is complete, those documents will be publicly disseminated via an accessible online resource that scholars, journalists, professors, teachers, and the public can use to better understand the Court, its members, and its work. Justice John Paul Stevens's recently-released papers offer memos, personal notes, and opinion drafts from when he joined the Court in 1975 through 2004. These papers are particularly useful for studying judicial collegiality because they cover a period where the Court's membership was steady and the justices on that Court communicated almost exclusively on paper (1994-2004). This project will collect the between 17,000 and 24,000 documents in the Stevens papers associated with the 880 cases the Supreme Court decided between the 1994 and 2004 terms, digitize them, and then use the texts to study the justices' relationships by examining (1) their engagement with each other during the decision-making process; (2) the tone they take while engaging with each other; and (3) the final voting coalitions. The analysis will also examine if and how judicial relationships shift when the justices consider altering precedent or using judicial review. This project is jointly funded by the Law and Science Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.