Doctoral Dissertation Research: Measuring Legal Quality on the U.S. Supreme Court

美国最高法院通过对抗式司法系统裁决案件。特别是，每个案件的对立双方的律师都会撰写法律简报，试图说服大法官，他们对法律的看法是最正确的。为了立案，律师们将他们的法律论点建立在现有法院判决的基础上，也就是所谓的先例。由于一些先例比其他先例更具相关性和影响力，律师的论点的整体实力将会有所不同。因此，该项目将产生一种法律质量的经验衡量标准，以确定案件中各方法律论点的强项(或弱点)。为了衡量法律质量，该项目将广泛借鉴最高法院退休大法官的档案材料。为了做到这一点，该项目将审查法官备忘录，这是由每个法官的法律书记员准备的文件。该项目将以数字方式拍摄、分析内容，并公开提供6000多份法官备忘录，涵盖1946-1994年间十几名退休大法官。这些法官备忘录根据各方提交的法律摘要中提供的信息以及法庭之友摘要中提供的信息，对双方的法律论点进行了评价。该项目将使用法官备忘录中的信息来评估，然后根据法律原则的多个方面制定法律质量的衡量标准。这一经验性措施与现有的现有数据相结合，将能够评估法律对最高法院决策过程的影响。

The U.S. Supreme Court decides cases by way of an adversarial system of justice. In particular, lawyers from opposing sides of each case write legal briefs that attempt to persuade the justices that their view of the law is the most correct. To make their case, lawyers base their legal arguments in existing court decisions, known as precedent. Because some precedent is more relevant and influential than others, there will be differences in the overall strength of the lawyer's arguments. Consequently, this project will generate an empirical measure of legal quality that identifies the strength (or weakness) of each side's legal arguments in a case. To generate this measure of legal quality, this project will draw extensively from the archival materials of retired Supreme Court justices. To do so, the project will examine bench memoranda, which are documents prepared by each justice's law clerks. The project will digitally photograph, content analyze, and make publicly available over 6,000 bench memoranda spanning nearly a dozen retired justices, from 1946-1994. These bench memoranda offer an evaluation of each side's legal arguments, based on the information provided in the legal briefs submitted by the parties, as well as that provided in the amicus curiae briefs, in each case. This project will use the information from the bench memoranda to evaluate and then create a measure of legal quality based on multiple aspects of legal doctrine. This resulting empirical measure, when combined with existing available data, will enable assessment of the impact of law on the Supreme Court's decision making process.