Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981

1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Segal
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Model

The overwhelming concensus of Fourth Amendment scholars is that the Supreme Court's sea and seizure cases are a mess. This article proposes that the confusion arises from the manner in which the cases were studied, not from the decisions themselves. A legal model with variables that me the prior justification of the search, the nature of the intrusion, and a few mitigating circumstance used to explain the Court's decisions on the reasonableness of a given search or seizure. The parameters are estimated through probit.The results show that the search and seizure cases are much more ordered than had commonly been believed. Virtually all of the estimates are as expected. Additionally, the Court is shown to act favorably toward the federal government than toward the states. Preliminary analysis suggests the model has predictive as well as explanatory value.

On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision Making

1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey E. George ◽  
Lee Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Stare Decisis ◽  
Legal Perspective ◽  
Legal Model ◽  
Legal Frameworks

How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.

Capital Punishment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas A. Powe
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Wide Margin

This chapter examines Supreme Court cases that were filed in Texas over the issue of capital punishment. When it comes to executions, Texas leads the nation by a wide margin. Between 1997 and 2000, Texas executed 132 people—significantly more than any other state since executions resumed after 1976. After the executions of Michael Richard and Carlton Turner, the Court started chipping away at capital punishment in the late 1960s. The chapter discusses cases relating to the constitutionality of the death penalty, including Branch v. Texas and Furman v. Georgia, as well as cases that came after thirty-five states and the federal government passed new legislation reinstating the death penalty. These include Smith v. Texas and cases involving Johnny Paul Penry, Robert Tennard, Jose Ernesto Medellin and Humberto Leal Garcia, Bobby J. Moore, and Duane Buck.

scholarly journals An Examination of the Coherence of Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Kahn-Fogel
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
The Body ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Systematic Evaluation ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Lower Court ◽  
Wrong Answer ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Lower Courts

For decades, scholars have routinely attacked the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as an incoherent mess, impossible for lower courts to follow. These scholars have based their claims almost entirely on qualitative analysis of the Court’s opinions. This Article presents the first systematic evaluation of the consensus view of Fourth Amendment law as incoherent. The primary method I use to evaluate the coherence of the body of law is an assessment of lower court performance on Fourth Amendment issues the Supreme Court would later resolve. Because the Supreme Court’s agreement with lower courts likely reflects, at least in part, the clarity of the Supreme Court’s previous pronouncements, a high rate of agreement between lower courts and the Supreme Court would tend to suggest the coherence of the field. On the other hand, if the Court concludes most lower courts got the wrong answer to a Fourth Amendment question, that conclusion suggests either a lack of clarity in the Court’s precedent or that the Court simply shifted course after having issued seemingly straightforward pronouncements in the past. Either of these possibilities would suggest a kind of incoherence or instability in Fourth Amendment law. I examine lower court decisions dealing with issues the Supreme Court subsequently addressed over the course of twenty Supreme Court terms. Because Supreme Court cases tend to deal with the most difficult, divisive issues, I also compare the frequency with which the Court has felt compelled to review Fourth Amendment questions to the rate at which the Court has dealt with other important constitutional issues.

scholarly journals Traffic Stops, Reasonable Suspicion, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: A State Constitutional Analysis

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Buffone
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Lower Courts ◽  
Reasonable Suspicion ◽  
Constitutional Analysis

The Fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures. Traditionally, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to require warrants supported by probable cause in both the search and seizure contexts. In Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court recognized that not all interactions between police and citizens involve intrusions serious enough to trigger the full probable cause standard. As a result, the Court delineated a specific, narrowly applicable exception to the general rule. The Court held that in situations where the police have specific and articulable grounds that provide them with reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, they may briefly detain an individual for purposes of investigation. Both the facts of Terry and the language of Justice Warren’s opinion leave no doubt that the exception was to be construed and applied in only the narrowest of contexts. However, as lower courts interpreted and applied Terry in the following years, the standard enunciated in Terry blurred considerably. Hence came the development of the wellentrenched, but nebulous, investigative detention doctrine.

Supreme Court Cases

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bulzomi ◽  
Robert M. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Court Cases

Dangerous Warrants

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirej Sekhon
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Police Discretion ◽  
Accurate Identification ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Municipal Court

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a "warrant preference" on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms "non-compliance warrants": summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing such warrants for minor offenses. For example, the Department of Justice found that the municipal court in Ferguson, Missouri issued one warrant for every two of its residents. When issued as wantonly as this, warrants are dangerous because they generate police discretion rather than restrain it. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has, most recently in Utah v. Strieff, treated non-compliance warrants as if no different from the traditional warrants that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment warrant preference. This article argues that non-compliance warrants pose unique dangers, constitutional and otherwise. Non-compliance warrants create powerful incentives for the police to conduct unconstitutional stops, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. Their enforcement also generates race and class feedback loops. Outstanding warrants beget arrests and arrests beget more warrants. Over time, this dynamic amplifies race and class disparities in criminal justice. The article concludes by prescribing a Fourth Amendment remedy to deter unconstitutional warrant checks. More importantly, the article identifies steps state and local courts might take to stem the continued proliferation of non-compliance warrants.

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