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The Conditioning Role of Judicial Independence in the Exercise of Judicial Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Garrett N. Vande Kamp
Garrett N. Vande Kamp*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia, USA
*
Contact the author at garrettvandekamp@uga.edu.
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Abstract

Scholars recognize that judicial review depends upon judicial independence: an independent court is more likely to invalidate a statute it opposes than a nonindependent court. But scholars have lost that the previous statement is a conditional relationship, in which judicial independence moderates the relationship between a court’s ideological preferences and its decision to strike statutes. I model this conditional relationship using the US Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions on important federal statutes. The analysis reveals that judicial independence is best modeled as a conditional predictor of judicial review and that modeling judicial independence as an additive predictor risks false negative results.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 261 - 282
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Joseph Ura and Matthew Hall for providing the initial data for this project. In addition, the author would like to thank many people for their helpful comments during throughout this project, including Jon Bond, David Fortunato, Ian Turner, Arnold Vedlitz, the Ura Writing Group, and the attendees of MPSA 2016, IHS Graduate Student Colloquium 2016, UT Graduate Conference in Public Law 2017, and EITM 2019. Finally, the author would like to thank all those associated with the review and publication of this article.

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