Collegiality and Legitimacy: Judicial Decision-Making During the Circuit Riding Century Open Access

Abstract

Despite its importance, the Supreme Court’s early history is rarely studied empirically. As McGuire acknowledges (2004), “[L]ongitudinal knowledge of the Supreme Court is quite limited” (128). There was an interesting quirk in the federal judicial hierarchy: the institution of circuit riding (1790-1891), where Supreme Court justices heard appellate cases on their assigned circuit courts and then could hear the same cases again when appealed to the Supreme Court. Since there was not a clear delineation between circuit judges and Supreme Court justices and Supreme Court did not have docket control during the “Circuit Riding Century,” current models of judicial hierarchy struggle explain this institutional setup (e.g. Cameron, Segal and Songer 2000). By reinterpreting the model in Carrubba and Clark (2012) to account for collegiality and legitimacy costs, this thesis is the first to formally model both judicial decision-making during the “Circuit Riding Century” and analyze the institutional impact of circuit riding on the Supreme Court. I provide an empirical design to quantitatively test the results of the model and discuss results that support the prediction made by the formal model.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 A Brief History of Circuit Riding 4 3 Previous Work 6 4 Auditing Costs during the Circuit Riding Century 8 4.1 Legitimacy Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 4.2 Collegiality Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 5 Models 13 5.1 Model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 5.2 Model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 5.3 Comparative Statics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 6 Discussion and Implications 23 6.1 Supreme Court and Circuit Riding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 7 Empirical Implications 25 7.1 Previous Work on Circuit Riding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 7.2 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 7.3 OLS Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 7.4 Difference-in-Differences Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 7.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 7.5.1 OLS Regressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 7.5.2 Difference-in-Differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 7.6 Discussion/Implications of Empirical Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 7.6.1 Institutional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 7.6.2 Judicial Hierarchy and Institutional Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 7.6.3 Norm of Consensus? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 7.7 Future Directions in Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 7.7.1 Hybrid Agency Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 8 Conclusion and Next Steps 47 9 Appendix: Supplemental Proofs and Results 49 List of Figures 1 Equilibria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2 Pre-1869 Supreme Court Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 List of Tables 1 Circuit OLS Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 2 1837 OLS Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3 1862 OLS Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 4 Raw Mean Affirm Rate: State Court Cases Control (1837) . . . . . . . . 36 5 Raw Mean Affirm Rate: DC Circuit Court Cases Control (1837) . . . . . 36 6 Raw Mean Affirm Rate: State Court Cases Control (1862) . . . . . . . . 36 7 Raw Mean Affirm Rate: DC Circuit Court Cases Control (1862) . . . . . 36 8 Judiciary Act of 1837 Diff-in-Diff Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 9 Judiciary Act 1862 Diff-in-Diff Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 10 Judiciary Act of 1837 Diff-in-Diff Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 11 Judiciary Act 1862 Diff-in-Diff Model Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	M.A.
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Law Political Science, General
Keyword	Judicial Hierarchy Circuit Riding Judicial Rule-Making Supreme Court Judicial Decision-Making
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Tom S. Clark, Emory University John W. Patty, Emory University

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