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This paper seeks to examine state court responses to U.S. Supreme Court remands. I look at cases that have been successfully appealed to the Supreme Court to see if the winning party prevails at the state court on remand. If they do win, I label this as deferential behavior by the state court. When a case is remanded from the U.S. Supreme Court, the state courts do not have to defer. Instead, they can avoid doing so in a number of ways, including denying that the points raised by the Court affect their decision and invoking their state constitution. I test a number of hypotheses generated by four theories of judicial behavior (simple legal, simple attitudinal, persuasion and strategic) that predict different effects of the strength of the Supreme Court mandate on the state court response. I operationalize the strength of the mandate using the number of justices joining the majority opinion and the number and type of separate opinions written in the case. I control for the form of the remand order, the level of the state court, whether the case is before or after Michigan v. Long, whether the case concerns an economic issue, whether the Court's ruing is per curiam and whether the Supreme Court opinion is more liberal than the original state court decision. I test these hypotheses on all of the cases successfully appealed from the state courts to the Supreme Court from the 1970 to 2000 terms with published state court responses. If the strength of mandate does indeed affect the way in which state courts treat remands from the Court, then it could mean that individual justices have an important role to play in determining whether or not state courts follow the U.S. Supreme Court. I find that there is evidence to support the importance of mandate strength effects, although the nature of the effect is itself surprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manner in which the Courts of Appeals have issued discretionary opinions over the years is an important one for judicial scholars. Notwithstanding, there has been a relative dearth of research on the this subject, particularly when compared to studies on the Supreme Court’s patten in this respect. Indeed, while numerous scholars have noted that discretionary opinions emanating from the federal appeals courts are uncommon, few of them specifically considered dissensus on the Courts of Appeals in its own right. In this paper I systematically examine discretionary opinion writing in the Courts of Appeals by longitudinally examining the influences on dissents, concurrences, and reversals over a time period of 72 years. Most critically, I find that the issuance of these discretionary opinions in the appeals courts is a dynamic process that is influenced most profoundly by behavioral patterns from within the institutional walls of the Courts of Appeals; as well, the Supreme Court has some influence on appeals court dissensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tests of strategic behavior focusing on numerous behaviors of members of the intermediate courts have yielded mixed and contradictory results. The failure of extant work to provide clear evidence that supports or refutes strategic explanations makes it necessary to conduct a broader and more basic test. We evaluate the hypothesis that minority (out-regime) status acts as a constraint on Courts of Appeals judges when they cast votes in panels. We hypothesize that out-regime judges will vote less ideologically than judges in the circuit majority. Using the method of generalized estimating equations (GEE) and an analysis of the marginal effects of the independent variables, we test for the operation of a constant minority status constraint and for the operation of constraint that is conditioned by panel and case characteristics. By incorporating important characteristics of the strategic context in the Courts of Appeals (panel composition and case salience) into our analysis we are able to draw a more nuanced picture of the relationship between ideological voting and minority status to reveal conditions that magnify and weaken the preference-voting relationship for in-regime and out-regime judges. We find that membership in the circuit minority constrains the behavior of ideologically extreme and, in some instances, moderate judges, although this constraint does not operate uniformly across panel types. While out-regime judges exhibit decreased ideological voting in homogenous (all-minority) panels and panels in which they are the sole members of their party, there are no significant differences in the behavior of majority (in-regime) judges on majority-majority panels and out-regime judges on majority-minority panels. We also observe that minority status tempers ideological voting to a greater degree in salient than in non-salient, cases. This would suggest that the out-regime judges behave as though the circuit is more vigilant in monitoring the behavior of out-regime judges in salient cases. Our analyses support the contention that appellate court judges take the expected behavior of their colleagues into account, at least in some circumstances. However, it is clear that strategic factors are not the only (or primary) determinants of outcomes in the Courts of Appeals. We conclude that the seemingly inconsistent and anomalous findings presented in other studies of the Courts of Appeals are an artifact of the inconstant nature of strategic behavior. While our analysis of the marginal effects of minority status indicates that some judges are engaging in strategic behavior, this appears to be a variable phenomenon. This study helps to elucidate the inconstant nature of strategic behavior in the Courts of Appeals and provides the foundation upon which firmer conclusions regarding the operation of strategic concerns in the Courts of Appeals can be built. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the factors that shape the size of majority opinions formed on state supreme courts in the U.S. Views of different scholars on things that motivate coalition behavior; Difference between justices serving on American state courts and members of the United States Supreme Court; Effects of threats from external actors on opinion coalition behavior of the courts.

The aggrandizement of the administrative state in terms of its size and power has enabled the federal judiciary to enter the political arena regarding control of the bureaucracy. Some scholars have argued that the manner in which courts responded to this development of modern administration is a function of the ideological foundation of the courts relative to the politics and decisions of the agencies. Yet, the Supreme Court?s seminal decision in Chevron mandates that courts must afford great deference to agency rule making, irrespective of the judges? ideology, thus providing for the possibility that this decision has acted as a jurisprudential regime by altering the manner in which subsequent administrative cases are evaluated. Which provides for greater influence on the Courts of Appeals, ideology or deference? Preliminary findings as reported herein suggest that Chevron did indeed shift decision making in the federal appeals courts and thus appears to have served as a jurisprudential regime in the area of administrative law. Notwithstanding, this increased tendency of courts to defer to agency action in the post-Chevron era coexists in tandem with the ideology of the courts, as it appears that both ideology and deference to administrative policy are critical to explaining this aspect of judicial behavior.The aggrandizement of the administrative state in terms of its size and power has enabled the federal judiciary to enter the political arena regarding control of the bureaucracy. Some scholars have argued that the manner in which courts responded to this development of modern administration is a function of the ideological foundation of the courts relative to the politics and decisions of the agencies. Yet, the Supreme Court?s seminal decision in Chevron mandates that courts must afford great deference to agency rule making, irrespective of the judges? ideology, thus providing for the possibility that this decision has acted as a jurisprudential regime by altering the manner in which subsequent administrative cases are evaluated. Which provides for greater influence on the Courts of Appeals, ideology or deference? Preliminary findings as reported herein suggest that Chevron did indeed shift decision making in the federal appeals courts and thus appears to have served as a jurisprudential regime in the area of administrative law. Notwithstanding, this increased tendency of courts to defer to agency action in the post-Chevron era coexists in tandem with the ideology of the courts, as it appears that both ideology and deference to administrative policy are critical to explaining this aspect of judicial behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The divisiveness of the lower federal court confirmation process has been the focus of extensive commentary by political pundits and scholars alike. The engine driving the controversy is the notion that who sits on the federal bench makes a difference for subsequent policy outcomes. However, while a great deal of attention has been paid to differences in the decision making of judges appointed by different presidents, virtually no attention has been paid to whether the concerns of actors involved in the process have been borne out in the behavior of controversial nominees who successfully ascend to the federal bench. In other words, we have no rigorous, systematic evidence as to whether controversial nominees do, in fact, behave differently than other nominees once they don the black robe. Using data from the United States Courts of Appeals Database, Phases I and II, and the Lower Federal Court Confirmation Database, I examine differences in voting behavior by judges appointed to arguably the most important of the lower federal courts: the United States Courts of Appeals. Specifically, I examine whether judges who were considered more controversial during their confirmation process are more ideologically-driven in their voting behavior than other, less controversial judges. The empirical results provide at least some support for the notion that confirmation politics influences subsequent judicial decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]