Michael Heise (Cornell Law School) has posted Modeling SCOTUS Merits Decisions Conditioned on Certiorari Grants on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper extends recent work finding a petitioner odd-party-out influence on the Court’s cert grant selections by exploring whether this influence also informs the Court’s merits decision selections conditioned on cert grants. Analyses in this study benefit from a dataset of all cert petitions from federal courts of appeals between 2003 and 2015. Core findings emphasize that while evidence of a petitioner odd-party-out influence remains salient for cert grant decisions, this influence does not persist into the Courts’ merits decision selections once conditioned on a successful cert petition. These findings imply that the Court approaches cert grant and merits decision selections differently and that research on the Court’s merits decision outcomes need to account for the critical filtering attributable to the Court’s cert grants.
Highly Recommended!
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