Inter-Court Relations in the American Legal System--II

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

A number of studies within the public law literature have analyzed legal citations to shed light on aspects of the U.S. judicial system. We build on the valuable insights of this literature in three ways. First, expanding beyond consideration of only a single court or level in the judicial hierarchy, we explore citation patterns throughout all levels of the judiciary in the state and federal courts. Second, drawing on powerful IT capabilities, we develop new techniques for analyzing a large pool of decisions in ways that would be infeasible with traditional techniques. Third, we use these techniques to examine the development of policy by the lower courts in the absence of substantial guidance from the High Court. We focus our citation analysis on the judicial decisions within a specific topic of constitutional law -- regulatory takings. This area of the law is attractive not only because of its intrinsic substantive appeal, but also because of the variation in the Supreme Court's involvement. The justices provided little guidance until 1978, when they began handing down numerous decisions on regulatory takings; this allows us to contrast lower court citation patterns in the presence and absence of substantial guidance from the High Court. Our first step is identifying the complete corpus of regulatory takings decisions from the early twentieth century to the present. Developing a methodology to accomplish this novel task enables us to locate the relevant body of citations in time, jurisdiction, and the judicial hierarchy, and to highlight notable dynamics within the flow of precedent. We also plan to test hypotheses exploring the relationship between citation patterns and a range of variables, including, for example: the prestige of particular courts; the "maturity" of a body of law; caseload volume; propinquity; and networks among legal and political actors.