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.

该项目将调查司法合议制在最高法院决策过程中所发挥的作用，特别关注当最高法院使用其最重要的权力来改变过去的决定和推翻国会的行为时，最高法院与许多美国人一样，关系如何变化。法官每天上班，出于多种原因，与同事和睦相处，尊重他们的观点和立场，这是任何工作场所正常运作的关键，但在最高法院尤其重要，因为法官经常在这里工作。互相接触然而，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现状，并且这种权力将使合议成为法院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交流，并利用这些论文来研究司法合议制。通过收集、数字化和分析来自伦奎斯特法院的数据，该项目将增强对司法决策过程的学术理解。最高法院的合议性，同时创建一个数据源，学者们可以使用该数据源来研究最高法院的大量决策过程。分析完成后，这些文件将通过学者们可访问的在线资源公开传播。记者、教授、教师和公众可以利用约翰·保罗·史蒂文斯大法官最近发布的文件来更好地了解法院、其成员及其工作，其中提供了他 2017 年加入法院时的备忘录、个人笔记和意见稿。 1975 年至 2004 年。这些文件对于研究司法合议特别有用，因为它们涵盖了法院成员稳定且法院法官几乎完全通过纸质进行交流的时期（1994 年至 2004 年）。该项目将收集 17,000 至 24,000 名文件。史蒂文斯文件中与最高法院在 1994 年至 2004 年任期期间裁决的 880 起案件相关的文件，将它们数字化，然后使用文本来研究法官之间的关系，方法是检查（1）他们在决策过程中的互动；（2）他们在互动时的语气；以及（3）最终结果；该分析还将研究当司法反映考虑改变先例或使用司法审查时，司法关系是否以及如何转变。该项目由法律和科学计划以及刺激竞争性研究既定计划共同资助。该奖项由 NSF 的法定奖项。使命和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，该项目被认为值得支持。