Strategic Defiance and Compliance in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Chad Westerland, Jeffrey A. Segal, Lee Epstein, Charles M. Cameron, and Scott Comparato

American Journal of Political Science 54: 891-905 (2010)
Click here for the article (pdf)
Click here for the data (dta) and here for supporting materials. Click here for a paper presenting a measurement strategy for placing judges of lower courts and justices of the Supreme Court in the same policy space.

Abstract
Why do lower courts treat Supreme Court precedents favorably or unfavorably? To address this question, we formulate a theoretical framework based on current principal-agent models of the judiciary. We use the framework to structure an empirical analysis of a random sample of 500 Supreme Court cases, yielding over 10,000 subsequent treatments in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. When the contemporary Supreme Court is ideologically estranged from the enacting Supreme Court, lower courts treat precedent much more harshly. Controlling for the ideological distance between the enacting and contemporary Supreme Courts, the preferences of the contemporary lower court itself are unrelated to its behavior. Hence, hierarchical control appears strong and effective. At the same time, however, a lower court’s previous treatments of precedent strongly influence its later treatments. The results have important implications for understanding legal change and suggest new directions for judicial principal-agency theory.

keywords: judicial behavior, U.S. Courts of Appeals, Supreme Court precedent, principal-agent theory, legal change, judicial compliance, hierarchical control, strategic defiance, court ideology