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

该项目将调查司法合议制在最高法院决策过程中的作用，特别关注当最高法院使用其最重要的权力改变过去的决定和推翻国会的行为时，关系如何转变。像许多美国人一样，最高法院的法官每天都去上班，出于多种原因，他们与同事友好地合作，并尊重他们的观点和立场。合议是任何工作场所运作的关键，但在最高法院尤为重要，大法官们经常相互接触，以解决影响最高法院备审案件的难题。然而，最高法院有权通过审查国会的法案或重新考虑自己过去的决定来改变法律的现状，这种权力使合议制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和使用这些文件来研究司法合议。通过收集、数字化和分析来自最高法院的数据，该项目将增强对最高法院合议制作用的学术理解，同时创建一个数据源，供学者们用于研究广泛的最高法院决策过程。分析完成后，这些文件将通过一个可访问的在线资源公开传播，学者、记者、教授、教师和公众可以使用该资源更好地了解法院、其成员及其工作。大法官约翰·保罗·史蒂文斯最近公布的文件提供了他1975年至2004年加入最高法院时的备忘录、个人笔记和意见稿。这些文件对研究司法合议制特别有用，因为它们涵盖了最高法院成员稳定、最高法院大法官几乎完全通过书面交流的时期（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年期间裁决的880起案件相关的17，000至24，000份文件，将其数字化，然后使用这些文本通过检查来研究法官的关系（1）他们在决策过程中的相互参与;（2）他们在相互接触时采取的语气;（3）最终的投票联盟。该分析还将研究当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以及促进竞争研究的既定计划共同资助。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。

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.