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Case Salience and the Influence of External Constraints on the Supreme Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Logan Strother
Logan Strother*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
Contact the author at lstrothe@purdue.edu.
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Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that Supreme Court decision making is significantly constrained by Congress and the public, often arguing that case salience is a key factor in the operation of these constraints. However, scholars have developed different theoretical expectations regarding the effects of case salience on justices and have found empirical support for mutually contradictory theories. Furthermore, these studies rely on an endogenous measure of case salience. I replicate two leading studies using a theoretically appropriate measure of case salience in order to shed new light on this important topic, finding evidence of constraint from the public in salient cases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 129 - 147
Copyright
© 2018 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The author thanks Tom Keck, Keith Bybee, Matthew Hall, Peter Enns, Spencer Piston, Jason Sorens, Ben Johnson, Paul Collins, Brandon Metroka, Shana Gadarian, Seth Jolly, Kevin McGuire, and Scott McClurg for many helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VFXPQG.

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