Inter-Court Relations in the American Legal System--II

公法文献中的一些研究分析了法律引用，以阐明美国司法系统的各个方面。我们以三种方式建立这些文献的宝贵见解。首先，我们超越了对单一法院或司法等级的考虑，探索了州和联邦法院各级司法机构的引文模式。其次，利用强大的IT能力，我们开发了新技术，以传统技术无法实现的方式分析大量决策。第三，我们使用这些技巧来考察在高等法院缺乏实质性指导的情况下，下级法院制定的政策。我们将引用分析的重点放在宪法中一个特定主题的司法判决上——监管征收。法律的这一领域具有吸引力，不仅因为其内在的实质性吸引力，而且还因为最高法院参与的变化。直到1978年，大法官们才开始就监管征用做出大量裁决，并提供了很少的指导；这使我们能够在有和没有高等法院实质性指导的情况下对比下级法院的引证模式。我们的第一步是确定从二十世纪初到现在的监管征收决定的完整语料库。开发一种方法来完成这项新任务，使我们能够在时间、管辖权和司法等级中定位相关的引用主体，并突出先例流动中的显著动态。我们还计划测试一些假设，探索引文模式与一系列变量之间的关系，例如：特定法院的声望；法律体系的“成熟”；案件量;接近;以及法律和政治参与者之间的网络。

A number of studies within the public law literature have analyzed legal citations to shed light on aspects of the U.S. judicial system. We build on the valuable insights of this literature in three ways. First, expanding beyond consideration of only a single court or level in the judicial hierarchy, we explore citation patterns throughout all levels of the judiciary in the state and federal courts. Second, drawing on powerful IT capabilities, we develop new techniques for analyzing a large pool of decisions in ways that would be infeasible with traditional techniques. Third, we use these techniques to examine the development of policy by the lower courts in the absence of substantial guidance from the High Court.We focus our citation analysis on the judicial decisions within a specific topic of constitutional law -- regulatory takings. This area of the law is attractive not only because of its intrinsic substantive appeal, but also because of the variation in the Supreme Court's involvement. The justices provided little guidance until 1978, when they began handing down numerous decisions on regulatory takings; this allows us to contrast lower court citation patterns in the presence and absence of substantial guidance from the High Court.Our first step is identifying the complete corpus of regulatory takings decisions from the early twentieth century to the present. Developing a methodology to accomplish this novel task enables us to locate the relevant body of citations in time, jurisdiction, and the judicial hierarchy, and to highlight notable dynamics within the flow of precedent. We also plan to test hypotheses exploring the relationship between citation patterns and a range of variables, including, for example: the prestige of particular courts; the "maturity" of a body of law; caseload volume; propinquity; and networks among legal and political actors.