Scholarship@WashULaw
Document Type
Article
Language
English (en)
Publication Date
2011
Publication Title
American Journal of Political Science
Abstract
Recent scholarship suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court might be constrained by Congress in constitutional cases. We suggest two potential paths to Congressional influence on the Court's constitutional decisions: a rational-anticipation model, in which the Court moves away from its preferences in order to avoid being overruled, and an institutional-maintenance model, in which the Court protects itself against Congressional attacks to its institutional prerogatives by scaling back its striking of laws when the distance between the Court and Congress increases. We test these models by using Common Space scores and the original roll-call votes to estimate support in the current Congress for the original legislation and the Court's preferences over that legislation. We find that the Court does not appear to consider the likelihood of override in constitutional cases, but it does back away from striking laws when it is ideologically distant from Congress.
Keywords
Judicial Review, Separation of Powers, Supreme Court, Congress
Publication Citation
Jeffrey A. Segal, Chad Westerland & Stefanie A. Lindquist, Congress, the Supreme Court, and Judicial Review: Testing a Constitutional Separation of Powers Model, 55 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 89 (2011)
Repository Citation
Lindquist, Stefanie A.; Segal, Jeffrey A.; and Westerland, Chad, "Congress, the Supreme Court, and Judicial Review: Testing a Constitutional Separation of Powers Model" (2011). Scholarship@WashULaw. 881.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_scholarship/881
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Judges Commons, Legal Studies Commons, Political Science Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons
Comments
The attached file represents the paper as presented at the 2nd Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies.