Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Political Science

States exercise authority over citizens' lives and property through the judicial system. In principle, judicial bodies ought to justify this responsibility by providing consistent rationales for their judgments. Consistency means that the outcome of a dispute is supported by reasoning which itself is supported by a majority of judges on a collegial court. Yet without strong assumptions, collective decision making in collegial courts and other bodies is susceptible to inconsistency. Resolving fundamental questions of life, liberty, and property in an inconsistent manner lacks legitimacy due to the lack of reasons given for the exercise of authority. Further, the fractured reasoning of these decisions means that lower courts bound by precedent to follow an inconsistent decision may struggle to determine which rationale or legal rule to apply and thus decide cases inconsistently themselves, cascading the weakening of legitimacy through the legal system. Despite the gravity of these potential consequences, the severity of the problem of judgment-rationale inconsistency is unknown. To remedy this lack of knowledge, I undertake a systematic study of inconsistency, focusing on the United States Supreme Court. I analyze the properties of inconsistent decisions, explore the impact of inconsistency on the lower federal courts, and investigate the frequency of inconsistency over time. My analysis advances knowledge about the Supreme Court and social choice theory in several ways. First, the investigation of the case-level correlates of inconsistency shows that the strongest form of inconsistency, the discursive dilemma, arises with unsettling frequency in politically salient cases and in exercises of judicial review over Congress. Second, an analysis of Supreme Court precedent showed that discursive dilemmas are followed significantly less than other precedents at the district court level. This finding indicates that inconsistent precedents are of little use to the legal sy (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gregory Caldeira (Advisor); Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Committee Member); Lawrence Baum (Committee Member); William Minozzi (Committee Member); Michael Neblo (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2007, Political Science

For years scholars have asserted that attorneys with more extensive expertise (either overall or in relation to opposing counsel) achieve a higher rate of success for their clients. However, there has been little direct investigation of how differing institutional features among courts might influence the impact of attorney expertise. This paper theorizes that the impact of attorney expertise on judicial decision-making is minimized in institutional contexts where a judge has significant access to neutral information (such as research provided by law clerks) in addition to the partisan information provided by counsel. A more complex method than those previously employed to measure attorney expertise is developed which incorporates information about an attorney's litigation experience, years of practice, relevant clerkships, subject-area specialization, Martindale-Hubbell rating, and law school achievements. The resulting index of attorney expertise is employed to compare attorneys' winning percentages in products liability cases in the federal district and circuit courts between 1995 and 2006. The results indicate that there is no statistically significant difference in the success rate of attorneys based on their expertise in the federal appellate courts where judges have relatively lower caseloads and more staff assistance than district court judges. However, in the district courts—where judges have less time and resources to obtain independent, neutral information—the winning percentage of attorneys with greater overall expertise than opposing counsel exceeds the baseline success rate to a statistically significant degree.

Committee: Sam Nelson (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Political Science

The selection of judges is a well researched area of judicial politics. However, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to explaining why some lawyers decide to seek judgeships and others do not. Some lawyers are born to be judges; they are arbitrators by nature and inclination or they have specific ideas about justice and how best to achieve it. Others may never have considered a career on the bench if not for the urging of friends, family, and party members. In contrast, there are lawyers who would love to be judges, who have the drive and ambition, but who, for whatever reason, never pursue the matter. However, not all lawyers who have an interest in serving choose to make the effort to achieve their ambitions. I would like to learn what encourages them and what deters them when they are deciding whether or not to make a run for office. The data for this study were gathered using a mail survey sent out to 1500 members of the Ohio legal community in June, 2002. The respondents were selected by random computer draw from the Ohio State Supreme Court's lawyer registry, which lists all lawyers practicing in Ohio. The survey consisted of a single mailing with no follow-ups or reminders. Of the 1500 respondents, 655 individuals completed and returned the surveys and sixty two (about 4%) were returned as undeliverable. This gave a response rate of 43.67%. I have developed several hypotheses concerning the ways in which lawyers weigh the costs and benefits of running for judicial office. These hypotheses are divided into two basic categories dealing with internal motivations and politics. Variables of internal motivation are those that relate to career choices, job satisfaction, family life, age, and a lawyer's current position. Political variables deal with the influence of politics on the lawyer's choices, whether it is the political identification of the members of the lawyer's community, the degree to which each person is politically active, or the degree to w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lawrence Baum (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Political Science

The study of support for courts long has been a focus of research by political scientists, and we know much about the levels and correlates of support for the U.S. Supreme Court. However, only recently has scholarly research focused on the question of support for state and local courts and scholars know much less about how support operates for these courts. Research on state and local courts is further hindered by the lack of a theory of support for courts. This research focuses on the concepts of diffuse and specific support for the Ohio Supreme Court. It draws upon two existing theoretical frameworks and creates a new, hybrid framework. The framework is able to explain the importance of support for courts and articulates mechanisms by which judgments of support are formed and changed over time. New survey data is used to provide information on the levels and correlates of diffuse and specific support for courts. A unique survey-based experiment was used to assess the influence of elite messages on diffuse support for the Ohio Supreme Court. This research found that the Ohio Supreme Court enjoys generally high levels of diffuse and specific support, and that the presence of a significant political controversy did not appear to change those levels of support substantially. It identifies a number of significant demographic and attitudinal correlates of support, including political knowledge and educational attainment. The research also found that elite messages could influence support for the court; however, limitations in the research design made it impossible to test the strength and direction of this influence. This research also looked at patterns of support for the Ohio Supreme Court on three separate measures—diffuse support, specific support, and support for the court's decision in the 2001 DeRolph v. State of Ohio case. Computer simulations were used to provide a measure of effect size for each of the predictors, and simulations revealed that in some cases a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lawrence Baum (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Political Science

A growing body of literature has suggested that courts are becoming increasingly powerful political actors in many contemporary democracies. This trend is supposed to be stronger where constitutional courts perform a so-called "abstract review" of legislation. Such courts are the potential recipients of litigation by opposition parties against legislation passed by parliamentary majorities, and enjoy the power to veto it if they find unconstitutional provisions. Since oppositions have unrestrained incentives to contribute to the expansion of these courts's jurisdiction and the latter are unconstrained by majority will, the inevitable result should be an important and systematic reduction of the discretion enjoyed by legislative majorities. Focusing on the cases of Spain and Portugal, where constitutional courts have been in place for about two decades, this study challenges such understanding of the consequences of abstract review of legislation. Its first part deals with the institutional design of constitutional courts in both countries, including the rules of appointment and retention of judges frequently neglected by the extant literature. It shows that, unless conditions are such that presently dominant political actors can shape judicial institutions as insurance mechanisms against their future displacement from power, the resulting rules are likely to prevent the conversion of courts into full-fledged countermajoritarian actors, and may even allow for their congruence with and responsiveness to the preferences of both present and future majorities. The second part of this study discusses how, in the last two decades, those institutional rules have actually shaped the incentives and constraints faced by majorities, oppositions, and judges. On the one hand, the possibility that strategic oppositions experience policy and electoral costs from litigation has contributed, most of the time, to keep the jurisdiction of constitutional courts over legislative processe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Gunther (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General