- Title
- Office of the Solicitor General Participation Before the United States Supreme Court: Influences on the Decision-Making Process
- Author
- Ditslear, Corey Alan
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University,
Political Science, 2003.
- Advisor
- Lawrence Baum
- Pages
- 221p.
- Abstract
- Research has also shown that the Office of the Solicitor General, the chief attorneys on behalf of the United States government, is significantly more successful before the Court than the average attorney. This success may require modification of the current understanding of the decision-making of the Supreme Court to include an element of influence outside the justices' ideological preferences. Previous research has focused on the success of the Office of the Solicitor General without delving into whether that success was a result of case selection by the Office of the Solicitor General, congruence of ideologies between the Office of the Solicitor General and the members of the Supreme Court, or some influence by the Office of the Solicitor General. This dissertation explores whether the Office of the Solicitor General's success is the result of influence on the justices by controlling for the justices' ideologies and the other potential influences on the justices' decisions such as public opinion, Congress, state governments, petitioner bias, and the experience of the attorneys for the period of 1953-1999. I find that the Office of the Solicitor General does exert an independent influence on the decisions of the justices that is robust across a variety of different subcategories of the data as well as for the entire dataset. The influence of the Office of the Solicitor General is on a par with the impact of the justices' own ideologies. Thus the influence of the Office of the Solicitor General can completely counter-balance the ideologies of the justices or when added to the impact of the ideologies, can make it virtually impossible for the position espoused by the government to lose. Because of this finding, I have used the subcategories of data to begin to explore the sources of the Office of the Solicitor General's influence. The subcategories reveal that the sources of the Office of the Solicitor General's influence include a general bias in favor of the government, variance in issue areas, and case selection by the Office of the Solicitor General. This research suggests that any attempt to model the decisions of the United States Supreme Court must include a component recognizing the influence of the executive branch as represented by the Office of the Solicitor General.
- Keywords
- Solicitor General; Supreme Court Decision-making; Law and Courts; Government Attorneys; Office of the Solicitor General
Document number: osu1041543128.
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Copyright 2003, all rights reserved.
