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The Development of a Legal Rule: The Federal Common Law of Public Nuisance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Paul J. Wahlbeck
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Abstract

Scholars from across disciplinary lines are interested in understanding legal development. One impediment to the quest for a systematic explanation has been measures of legal change. Indicators like whether a court overturns an earlier ruling capture one facet of legal change but fail to capture the full range of courts' actions to develop legal doctrine. I introduce an alternative measure of legal change here—one based on Levi's (1949) focus on whether factual circumstances are or are not encompassed by the law. I use the U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions on the federal common law of public nuisance to illustrate this measure. Utilizing a multinomial logit model to explore the appellate judiciary's decisions to develop this legal doctrine, I find that the judges' decisions to develop the federal common law are explained by the judges' policy preferences; the litigation environment consisting of party resources, attorney experience, and amicus support; as well as the broader political context of public opinion and Supreme Court rulings.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , 1998 , pp. 613 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The author thanks Lee Epstein, William Lowry, John Sprague, and Robert Salisbury for their helpful comments on earlier iterations of this work. He also thanks Steve Balla, Larry Baum, Forrest Maltzman, Chuck Shipan, Lee Sigelman, and Jim Spriggs for their help and suggestions. An earlier version was presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington.

References

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