Academic Round-Up

David Strauss (University of Chicago Law School) has recently written an excellent, very short essay responding to the Epstein, et al. piece on ideological drift, which I highlighted in the August 8 round-up, see here. The Strauss paper can be downloaded here on the Northwestern Law Review’s Colloquy website. I like Professor Strauss’s piece because it highlights one of the key limitations of the Martin-Quinn scores: it is a general measure of ideology and it does not account directly for Justices’ positions on individual issues. For example, Roosevelt appointed both Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter, both of whom were supportive of the New Deal, but who later took divergent positions on key issues such as free speech and reapportionment. Ideology did, and should have, mattered a great deal to Roosevelt, who cared more about the future of the New Deal than other ideological issues that would later emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. I enjoyed this very fine piece.

The final version of my co-authored piece with Ryan W. Scott, entitled “An Empirical Analysis of Life Tenure: A Response to Professors Calabresi and Lindgren” is available for download on SSRN, see here, and will soon be in print in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Even though it is short and somewhat technical, I am particularly proud of this paper because we took an issue that had become conventional wisdom–that the meaning of life tenure has changed in a dramatic and unprecedented fashion because Justices are serving longer than ever before–and debunked it empirically. Although length of tenure on the Supreme Court has indeed increased, we argue that the change is neither unprecedented (length of tenure reached similar heights in the early 1800s) nor dramatic. I enjoyed working on this paper quite a bit.

Jeff Yates and Andrew Whitford (both of the University of Georgia) have started a new blog entitled “Voir Dire,” see here. Both Yates and Whitford have written papers dealing with law and courts, including the Supreme Court, and their work is very good. For those of you who have an interest in the work being done by political scientists in the area of law and courts, Voir Dire would be an excellent blog to bookmark. In fact, one of their first posts on August 17 was about preference change in the Supreme Court, an issue that I have written about in a number of academic round-ups.