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

美国最高法院通过对抗性司法制度来裁决案件。特别是，每个案件的对立双方的律师撰写法律摘要，试图说服法官他们的法律观点是最正确的。为了证明自己的观点，律师们把他们的法律论点建立在现有的法院判决上，也就是所谓的先例。因为一些先例比其他先例更相关、更有影响力，所以律师的论点的整体强度会有所不同。因此，本项目将产生一种法律质量的经验性衡量，以确定案件中每一方法律论据的优势（或劣势）。为了产生这种法律质量的衡量标准，该项目将从退休的最高法院法官的档案材料中广泛提取。为此，该项目将审查法官备忘录，这是由每位法官的法律助理准备的文件。该项目将对1946年至1994年间的近12位退休法官的6000多份法官备忘录进行数字化拍摄、内容分析，并将其公之于众。这些法庭备忘录根据各方提交的法律摘要中提供的信息以及在每个案件中法庭之友摘要中提供的信息，对每一方的法律论点进行评估。本项目将使用法官备忘录中的信息，根据法律原则的多个方面来评估并创建法律质量的衡量标准。由此产生的经验测量与现有可用数据相结合，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.