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Introduction to the Symposium

Comments on Scholarship Measuring Judicial Personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Kevin M. Quinn
Kevin M. Quinn*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, USA
*
Contact the author at kmq@umich.edu.
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Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Law and Courts features articles devoted to measuring the personality traits of US Supreme Court justices. In this brief comment, I attempt to do the following. First, I briefly summarize Hall et al. (2021) and Black et al. (2021). Here I pay special attention to some of the methodological issues that give rise to the disagreement between these authors. Second, I provide some general thoughts on the enterprise of attempting to measure personality traits of US Supreme Court justices. While I am generally skeptical of the utility of such an enterprise, I could be convinced of its value. Accordingly, I attempt to lay out what a skeptic like myself would like to see in order to be convinced of the intellectual value added of work in this area.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 337 - 343
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

This article was reviewed by the editor, Tom S. Clark.

References

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