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Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Jeffrey A. Segal
Jeffrey A. Segal*
Affiliation:
State University of New Yorkat Stony Brook
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Abstract

The overwhelming concensus of Fourth Amendment scholars is that the Supreme Court's sea and seizure cases are a mess. This article proposes that the confusion arises from the manner in which the cases were studied, not from the decisions themselves. A legal model with variables that me the prior justification of the search, the nature of the intrusion, and a few mitigating circumstance used to explain the Court's decisions on the reasonableness of a given search or seizure. The parameters are estimated through probit.

The results show that the search and seizure cases are much more ordered than had commonly been believed. Virtually all of the estimates are as expected. Additionally, the Court is shown to act favorably toward the federal government than toward the states. Preliminary analysis suggests the model has predictive as well as explanatory value.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 891 - 900
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1984

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