Estimating the Locations of Interests, Governments, and Justices in Legal Policy Space

University Of California - Merced, Merced CA

Investigators

Abstract

Organized interests are more likely to file friend of the Court briefs with the Supreme Court when the organization and the Court agree. However, there have been both data and theoretical limits to the ability to test this hypothesis. Spatial understandings of the law provide a significant theoretical advance on explaining judicial decisionmaking. For any legal dispute, there are different legal precedents or rules that courts can adopt. By locating the ideal policy positions of various interest groups in the same dimensions as those of the justices, this project will allow testing of hypotheses concerning whether legally mobilized interests are highly polarized, whether policy preferences change over time, and whether preferences track justices' voting preferences. Measures do not currently exist, however, for the preferences of third parties advocating at the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, while the rise of interest advocacy is one of the defining features of the modern Court, researchers have been limited in the rigor with which they can test theories of the incidence and impact of the participation of these extra-legal actors, which range from interest groups to businesses to state governments to the United States, the latter represented by the Solicitor General. To map the location of these actors in legal policy space this project proposes applying measurement innovations from the field of quantitative psychology to data on the positions articulated in decades-worth of amicus briefs filed at the Court. This research will produce a searchable online database of the involvement of interests and governments at the Court, which will be a useful resource for researchers and students. The project will contribute to training students who are members of underrepresented groups, contributing to improved retention of students as well.