Collaborative Research: Precedent-Altering Opinions and Collegiality on the Supreme Court

合作研究：改变先例的意见和最高法院的合议制

• 批准号: 2341492
• 负责人: Jessica Schoenherr
• 金额: $ 7.48万
• 依托单位: University of South Carolina at Columbia
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-03-01 至 2025-02-28
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2341492&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Precedent; Altering; Opinions

This project will investigate the role judicial collegiality plays in the Supreme Court decision-making process, with a particular focus on how relationships shift when the Court uses its most significant powers of altering past decisions and overturning acts of Congress. Like many Americans, Supreme Court justices go to work everyday and, for a multitude of reasons, work amiably with their colleagues and show respect for their views and positions. Collegiality is the key to any functioning workplace, but it is especially important at the Supreme Court, where the justices regularly engage with each other to resolve the difficult questions that color the Court’s docket. Yet the Supreme Court is empowered to alter the legal status quo by reviewing acts of Congress or reconsidering its own past decisions, and that power stands to make collegiality the most and least important factor in the judicial decision-making process. Investigating these relationships requires collecting past judicial communications and using those papers to study judicial collegiality. By collecting, digitizing, and analyzing data from the Rehnquist Court, this project will enhance scholarly understanding of the role of collegiality at the Supreme Court while simultaneously creating a data source that scholars can use to study wide swaths of the otherwise-private Supreme Court decision-making process. After the analysis is complete, those documents will be publicly disseminated via an accessible online resource that scholars, journalists, professors, teachers, and the public can use to better understand the Court, its members, and its work. Justice John Paul Stevens's recently-released papers offer memos, personal notes, and opinion drafts from when he joined the Court in 1975 through 2004. These papers are particularly useful for studying judicial collegiality because they cover a period where the Court's membership was steady and the justices on that Court communicated almost exclusively on paper (1994-2004). This project will collect the between 17,000 and 24,000 documents in the Stevens papers associated with the 880 cases the Supreme Court decided between the 1994 and 2004 terms, digitize them, and then use the texts to study the justices' relationships by examining (1) their engagement with each other during the decision-making process; (2) the tone they take while engaging with each other; and (3) the final voting coalitions. The analysis will also examine if and how judicial relationships shift when the justices consider altering precedent or using judicial review.This project is jointly funded by the Law and Science Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个项目将调查司法合议制在最高法院决策过程中的作用，特别侧重于当最高法院使用其最重要的权力改变过去的裁决和推翻国会法案时，关系如何变化。像许多美国人一样，最高法院法官每天都去工作，出于各种原因，他们与同事和蔼可亲地工作，并尊重他们的观点和立场。合议制是任何正常运作的工作场所的关键，但在最高法院尤其重要，在最高法院，大法官们经常相互接触，以解决影响最高法院议程的棘手问题。然而，最高法院有权通过审查国会法案或重新考虑自己过去的决定来改变法律现状，这种权力将使联合执政成为司法决策过程中最重要和最不重要的因素。调查这些关系需要收集过去的司法通信，并利用这些文件来研究司法合议制。通过收集、数字化和分析伦奎斯特法院的数据，该项目将加强学术上对最高法院合议制作用的理解，同时创建一个数据来源，学者们可以用来研究最高法院决策过程的广泛领域，否则这是私密的。分析完成后，这些文件将通过可访问的在线资源公开传播，学者、记者、教授、教师和公众可以利用这些资源更好地了解法院、其成员及其工作。法官约翰·保罗·史蒂文斯最近发布的文件提供了从1975年他加入最高法院到2004年期间的备忘录、个人笔记和意见草稿。这些文件对于研究司法合议制特别有用，因为它们涵盖了法院成员稳定的一段时期，该法院的法官几乎完全以书面形式进行沟通(1994-2004年)。该项目将收集史蒂文斯文件中与最高法院在1994年至2004年任期内裁决的880起案件有关的17,000至24,000份文件，将这些文件数字化，然后使用这些文件通过检查(1)大法官在决策过程中彼此之间的接触；(2)他们在相互接触时采取的语气；以及(3)最终投票联盟来研究大法官之间的关系。该分析还将审查当大法官考虑改变先例或使用司法审查时，司法关系是否以及如何发生变化。该项目由法律和科学计划和既定的促进竞争性研究计划联合资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。