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Procedural Justice, Institutional Legitimacy, and the Acceptance of Unpopular U.S. Supreme Court Decisions: A Reply to Gibson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Tom R. Tyler  and
Kenneth Rasinski
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Abstract

Gibson (1989) questions whether the Supreme Court's ability to legitimate unpopular policies is based on public views that the Court is a fair decisionmaker. His claim is based on his analysis of a survey examining the ability of the Supreme Court to gain acceptance of the right of an unpopular political group to demonstrate. A reanalysis of Gibson's data using a model allowing for both direct and indirect effects of public views about the fairness of court decisionmaking procedures on acceptance does not support Gibson's conclusion that procedure has no influence on acceptance. Our results indicate that public views about the fairness of Supreme Court decisionmaking procedures have an indirect effect on acceptance through their influence on public views about the Court's legitimacy and support the suggestion of a number of studies that the legitimacy of both local and national legal institutions, and the willingness to accept their decisions, are influenced by views about the fairness of their decisionmaking procedures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 1991 , pp. 621 - 630
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The data used in this article were collected by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. They include the main 1987 General Social Survey data and the results of an additional interview funded by a National Science Foundation grant to James Gibson. The authors would like to thank Norman M. Bradburn and Tom W. Smith, for help in obtaining the 1987 GSS main study data, and James Gibson, for providing the data from the additional interview. This reanalysis is based almost entirely on material from the additional interview.

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