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Measuring Supreme Court Case Complexity

Author

Listed:
  • Greg Goelzhauser
  • Benjamin J Kassow
  • Douglas Rice

Abstract

Case complexity is central to the study of judicial politics. The dominant measures of Supreme Court case complexity use information on legal issues and provisions observed postdecision. As a result, scholars using these measures to study merits stage outcomes such as bargaining, voting, separate opinion production, and opinion content introduce posttreatment bias and exacerbate endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, existing issue measures are not valid proxies for complexity. Leveraging information on issues and provisions extracted from merits briefs, we develop a new latent measure of Supreme Court case complexity. This measure maps with the prevailing understanding of the underlying concept while mitigating inferential threats that hamper empirical evaluations. Our brief-based measurement strategy is generalizable to other contexts where it is important to generate exogenous and pretreatment indicators for use in explaining merits decisions. (JEL K00, K40)

Suggested Citation

  • Greg Goelzhauser & Benjamin J Kassow & Douglas Rice, 2022. "Measuring Supreme Court Case Complexity," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 38(1), pages 92-118.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:92-118.
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewaa027
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    Cited by:

    1. Greg Goelzhauser, 2024. "Constitutional accountability for police shootings," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(1), pages 92-108, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K00 - Law and Economics - - General - - - General (including Data Sources and Description)
    • K40 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - General

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