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

公法文献中的一些研究分析了法律的引用，以阐明美国司法系统的各个方面。 我们以三种方式建立在这些文献的宝贵见解之上。 首先，扩展超出考虑只有一个单一的法院或在司法层次结构的水平，我们探讨引用模式在州和联邦法院的各级司法机构。 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，我们使用这些技术来检查政策的发展，由下级法院在缺乏实质性的指导，从高等法院。我们把我们的引文分析的司法判决在一个特定的主题，宪法-监管takings。 这一领域的法律之所以有吸引力，不仅是因为其内在的实质性吸引力，而且还因为最高法院的参与程度各不相同。 直到1978年，大法官们才提供了一些指导。1978年，大法官们开始对大量的管制性征用做出裁决。这使得我们能够对比在高等法院有无实质性指导的情况下，下级法院的引用模式。我们的第一步是确定从世纪初到现在的管制性征用裁决的完整语料库。 开发一种方法来完成这一新的任务，使我们能够找到相关机构的引用时间，管辖权和司法等级，并突出显着的动态内的先例流。 我们还计划测试假设，探索引用模式和一系列变量之间的关系，包括，例如：特定法院的声望;“成熟度”的法律机构;案件量;接近;和法律的和政治行为者之间的网络。

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.