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: 2341491
• 负责人: Jonathan King
• 金额: $ 8.47万
• 依托单位: West Virginia University Research Corporation
• 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=2341491&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.

该项目将调查最高法院的决策过程中司法合作的作用，并特别关注法院使用其最重要的改变过去决策和推翻国会行为的权力时的关系转变。像许多美国人一样，最高法院大法官每天都在上班，出于多种原因，很容易与同事一起工作，并对他们的观点和立场表示尊重。合作是任何功能齐全的工作场所的关键，但在最高法院尤其重要，在最高法院，这些大法官经常互相互动以解决法院案卷的困难问题。然而，最高法院有权通过审查国会法案或重新考虑自己的过去决定来改变法律现状，并且权力使合作是司法决策过程中最重要的最重要因素。调查这些关系需要收集过去的司法沟通，并使用这些论文来研究司法合作。通过收集，数字化和分析Rehnquist法院的数据，该项目将对最高法院的合作作用进行科学理解，同时创建一个数据源，学者可以使用该数据源来研究私人私人的最高法院最高法院决策过程。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，教师和公众可以用来更好地理解法院，其成员及其工作。大法官约翰·保罗·史蒂文斯（John Paul Stevens）最近发行的论文提供了备忘录，个人笔记和意见草案，从1975年至2004年加入法院时。这些论文对于研究司法协会特别有用，因为它们涵盖了法院会员稳定的时期，该法院在该法院上的法庭几乎完全在纸上进行了交流（1994-2004）。该项目将在史蒂文斯（Stevens）论文中收集17,000至24,000个文件，其中最高法院在1994年至2004年之间的880个案件相关的案件中，将其数字化，然后使用这些文本来研究法官在决策过程中彼此的互动来研究大法官的关系； （2）他们在互相互动时采取的语气； （3）最终发声。该分析还将检查当大法官考虑更改先例或使用司法审查时，司法关系是否发生变化。该项目由法律和科学计划和既定计划共同资助，以刺激有竞争力的研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是通过基金会的知识优点和广泛影响的评估来评估的值得支持的。