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Empirically Evaluating the Countermajoritarian Difficulty

Public Opinion, State Policy, and Judicial Review before Roe v. Wade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Jonathan P. Kastellec
Jonathan P. Kastellec*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
*
Contact the author at jkastell@princeton.edu.
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Abstract

I conduct a quantitative evaluation of the “countermajoritarian difficulty” by examining the relationship between public opinion, state policy, and judicial review in constitutional challenges to state abortion statutes in the period before Roe v. Wade. I find that state and lower federal court judges tended to invalidate statutes in states with high levels of public support for moving policy away from the status quo, and judges did not strike down statutes in states where majorities firmly supported the status quo. These results suggest the importance of creating a role for state and lower federal courts in evaluating the countermajoritarian difficulty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Spring 2016 , pp. 1 - 42
Copyright
© 2016 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I thank Or Bassok, Ted Englehardt, Barry Friedman, Matthew Hall, Jeff Lax, Scott Lemieux, Stefanie Lindquist, Herschel Nachlis, and Keith Whittington for helpful comments and Christopher Mooney for generously sharing his data. Replication materials can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EN0Z6B.

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