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SUPREME COURT SUPPORT FOR THE UNITED STATES: THE EFFECT OF PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENTS
Author(s) -
Brent James C.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
southeastern political review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 0730-2177
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.1998.tb00472.x
Subject(s) - supreme court , presidential system , law , political science , set (abstract data type) , computer science , politics , programming language
In a 1990 article, Jeffrey Segal attempted to document the effects of Supreme Court appointments on judicial decisions made in cases in which the U.S. Solicitor General had filed an amicus brief. Although his hypotheses were well justified by theory, the expected relationships did not emerge. In this paper, I argue that the effects that Segal sought to discover should be more apparent in cases in which the United States is a litigant than in cases in which the U.S. appears only as amicus. Based on this discussion, I then replicate Segal's analysis using a new set of data. The findings provide some support for Segal's original hypothesis: presidential appointments do matter. However, the relationship is more subtle than originally suggested by Segal, and to a certain extent is time‐bound.