Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-16T15:38:29.766Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring the Issue Content of Supreme Court Opinions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Douglas Rice
Douglas Rice*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
*
Contact the author at drrice@umass.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The opinions of the US Supreme Court are central to volumes of research on law, courts, and politics. To understand these complex and often-lengthy documents, scholars frequently rely on dichotomous indicators of opinion content. While sometimes appropriate, for many research settings this simplification of opinion content systematically omits important information. Using all US Supreme Court opinions from 1803 to 2010 in association with structural topic models, I instead demonstrate the value of representing the Court’s attention in opinions in terms of topic proportions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 107 - 127
Copyright
© 2019 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Tom Clark, Marie Hojnacki, James Honaker, Burt Monroe, Joseph Smith, and Chris Zorn for their helpful comments and suggestions on prior iterations of this research. 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/YFLR9W.

References

Baird, Vanessa. 2004. “The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda.” Journal of Politics 66 (3): 755–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baird, Vanessa. 2007. Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Baird, Vanessa and Tonja, Jacobi. 2009a. “How the Dissent Becomes the Majority: Using Federalism to Transform Coalitions in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Duke Law Journal 59:183–238.Google Scholar
Baird, Vanessa 2009b. “Judicial Agenda-Setting through Signaling and Strategic Litigant Responses.” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 29:215–39.Google Scholar
Benesh, Sara and Harold, Spaeth. 2007. “The Constraint of Law: A Study of Supreme Court Dissensus.” American Politics Research 35 (5): 755–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan, Schutte, Rachel, and Timothy, Johnson. 2013. “Trying to Get What You Want: Heresthetical Maneuvering and U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making.” Political Research Quarterly 66:819–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blei, David and John, Lafferty. 2009. “Topic Models.” In Text Mining: Classification, Clustering, and Applications, ed. A. Srivastava and M. Sahami. Boca Raton, FL: CRC.Google Scholar
Blei, David, Ng, Andrew, and Michael, Jordan. 2003. “Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Journal of Machine Learning Research 3:993–1022.Google Scholar
Carrubba, Cliff and Christopher, Zorn. 2010. “Executive Discretion, Judicial Decision Making, and Separation of Powers in the United States.” Journal of Politics 72 (3): 812–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Paul. 2008. Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denny, Matthew and Arthur, Spirling. 2018. “Text Preprocessing for Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, and What to Do about It.” Political Analysis 26 (2): 168–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee, Knight, Jack, and Andrew, Martin. 2003. “The Political (Science) Context of Judging.” St. Louis University Law Journal 47:783–817.Google Scholar
Epstein, Lee and Jeffrey, Segal. 2000. “Measuring Issue Salience.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (1): 66–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee and Olga, Shvetsova. 2002. “Heresthetical Maneuvering on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 14 (1): 93–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee and Thomas, Walker. 2017. Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Institutional Powers and Constraints. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Michael, McIntosh, Wayne, Lin, Jimmy, and Cynthia, Cates. 2007. “Recounting the Courts? Applying Automated Content Analysis to Enhance Empirical Legal Research.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4:1007–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, Louis. 2004. “Judicial Finality or an Ongoing Colloquy?” In Making Policy, Making Law: An Inter-branch Perspective, ed. Mark C. Miller and Jeb Barnes, 153–69. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Flemming, Roy, Bohte, John, and Wood., B. Dan 1997. “One Voice among Many: The Supreme Court’s Influence on Attentiveness to Issues in the United States.” American Journal of Political Science 41 (4): 1224–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flemming, Roy, Wood, B. Dan, and John, Bohte. 1999. “Attention to Issues in a System of Separated Powers: The Macro-Dynamics of American Policy Agendas.” Journal of Politics 61 (1): 76–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Barry. 2006. “Taking Law Seriously.” Perspectives on Politics 4 (2): 261–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Andrew and Jennifer, Hill. 2007. Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models. New York: Cambridge University.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan, Malhotra, Neil, Dowling, Conor, and David, Doherty. 2010. “Publication Bias in Two Political Behavior Literatures.” American Politics Research 38 (4): 591–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goelzhauser, Greg and Nicole, Vouvalis. 2014. “Measuring Case Complexity.” Paper presented at the 72nd Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 3–6.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Thomas L., and Mark, Steyvers. 2004. “Finding Scientific Topics.” Supplement, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101:5228–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, Justin. 2010. “A Bayesian Hierarchical Topic Model for Political Texts: Measuring Expressed Agendas in Senate Press Releases.” Political Analysis 18:1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, Anna and Michael, Woodruff. 2011. “Confirmation Bias in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 29 (2): 414–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, , In Song. 2017. “Political Cleavages within Industry: Firm-Level Lobbying for Trade Liberalization.” American Political Science Review 111 (1): 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lauderdale, Benjamin E., and Tom, S. Clark. 2014. “Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes.” American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12085.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, Michael, Benoit, Kenneth, and John, Garry. 2003. “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data.” American Political Science Review 47:215–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Law, David. 2016. “Constitutional Archetypes.” Texas Law Review 95:153–245.Google Scholar
Lax, Jeffrey and Kelly, Rader. 2015. “Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court: Evidence from Opinion Assignment and Vote Switching.” Journal of Politics 77 (3): 648–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maltzmann, Forrest, James Spriggs, and Paul, Wahlbeck. 2000. Crafting Law on the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McAtee, Andrea and Kevin, McGuire. 2007. “Lawyers, Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the US Supreme Court?” Law and Society Review 41:259–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, Kevin and Georg, Vanberg. 2005. “Mapping the Policies of the U.S. Supreme Court: Data, Opinions, and Constitutional Law.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 1–5.Google Scholar
McGuire, Kevin, Georg, Vanberg., Smith, Charles, and Gregory, Caldeira. 2009. “Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Politics 71 (4): 1305–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pacelle, Richard. 1995. “The Dynamics and Determinants of Agenda Change in the Rehnquist Court.” In Contemplating Courts, ed. Lee Epstein. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Peters, C. Scott. 2007. “Getting Attention: The Effect of Legal Mobilization on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Attention to Issues.” Political Research Quarterly 60:561–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinn, Kevin, Monroe, Burt, Crespin, Michael, Colaresi, Michael, and Dragomir, Radev. 2010. “How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs.” American Journal of Political Science 54:209–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, Douglas. 2014. “The Impact of Supreme Court Activity on the Judicial Agenda.” Law and Society Review 48 (1): 63–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, Douglas. 2016. “Issue Divisions and US Supreme Court Decision Making.” Journal of Politics 79 (1): 210–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, Mark and Herbert, Kritzer. 2002. “Jurisprudential Regimes in Supreme Court Decision Making.” American Political Science Review 96:305–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, Mark, Smith, Joseph, and Herbert, Kritzer. 2006. “Does Chevron Matter?” Law and Policy 28:444–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Margaret, Stewart, Brandon, and Edoardo, Airoldi. 2016. “A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 111 (515): 988–1003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Margaret, Stewart, Brandon, Tingley, Dustin, and Edoardo, Airoldi. 2013. “The Structural Topic Model and Applied Social Science.” In Proceedings of the 2013 NIPS Workshop on Topic Models: Computation, Application, and Evaluation.Google Scholar
Roberts, Margaret, Stewart, Brandon, Tingley, Dustin Luca, Christopher, Leder-Luis, Jetson, Gadarian, Shana, Albertson, Bethany, and David, Rand. 2014. “Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses.” American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey. 1984. “Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search-and-Seizure Cases, 1962–1981.” American Political Science Review 78 (4): 891–900.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey. 1986. “Supreme Court Justices as Human Decision-Makers: An Individual Level Analysis of the Search-and-Seizure Cases.” American Journal of Political Science 48:938–55.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Carolyn. 2009. “Coding Complexity: Bringing Law to the Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court.” Hastings Law Journal 60:477–540.Google Scholar
Simonsohn, Uri, Nelson, Leif, and Joseph, Simmons. 2014. “P-Curve: A Key to the File-Drawer.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143 (2): 534–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spaeth, Harold, Epstein, Lee, Ruger, Ted, Benesh, Sara C., Segal, Jeffrey, and Andrew, D. Martin. 2018. Supreme Court Database Code Book. http://supremecourtdatabase.org.Google Scholar
Szmer, John and Barry, Edwards. 2011. “Future Directions in Data Analysis and Collection.” Law and Courts Newsletter 21:16–19.Google Scholar
Tingley, Dustin. 2017. “Rising Power on the Mind.” International Organization 71 (1): 165–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallach, Hanna, Mimno, David, and Andrew, McCallum. 2009. “Rethinking LDA: Why Priors Matter.” https://papers.nips.cc/paper/3854-rethinking-lda-why-priors-matter.pdf.Google Scholar
Wedeking, Justin. 2010. “Supreme Court Litigants and Strategic Framing.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (3): 617–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar