Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Creation and Evolution of Precedent on the US Supreme Court

Texas A&M Research Foundation, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

Given that the United States Supreme Court is not specifically required to follow past decisions, it has been difficult to explain why the Court ever adheres to precedent that it does not agree with. Consequently, research to-date has sought to determine if the Supreme Court is an unconstrained political actor or if it is constrained by a norm of following precedent. The current research responds to this existing puzzle by empirically testing the theory that the US Supreme Court adheres to precedent because of its effect in guiding lower court decision-making in those thousands of cases that the US Supreme Court will never hear. The research plan involves coding 53 US Supreme Court cases and 1700 Court of Appeals cases from the period 1965 through 2008 related to gender equity claims. Using this data, the researcher will test the relationship between precedent and other political and institutional concerns. The findings from this research will advance understanding of the impact of existing legal decisions on the present decision making processes of the US Supreme Court.