IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/polals/v20y2012i03p329-350_01.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Genealogy of Law

Author

Listed:
  • Clark, Tom S.
  • Lauderdale, Benjamin E.

Abstract

Many theories of judicial politics have at their core the concepts of legal significance, doctrinal development and evolution, and the dynamics of precedent. Despite rigorous theoretical conceptualization, these concepts remain empirically elusive. We propose the use of a genealogical model (or “family tree†) to describe the Court's construction of precedent over time. We describe statistical assumptions that allow us to estimate this kind of structure using an original data set of citation counts between Supreme Court majority opinions. The genealogical model of doctrinal development provides a parsimonious description of the dependencies between opinions, while generating measures of legal significance and other related quantities. We employ these measures to evaluate the robustness of a recent finding concerning the relationship between ideological homogeneity within majority coalitions and the legal impact of Court decisions.

Suggested Citation

  • Clark, Tom S. & Lauderdale, Benjamin E., 2012. "The Genealogy of Law," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(3), pages 329-350, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:20:y:2012:i:03:p:329-350_01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1047198700013863/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael J Bommarito II & Daniel Martin Katz, 2016. "Measuring the temperature and diversity of the U.S. regulatory ecosystem," Papers 1612.09244, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2017.
    2. Tom S Clark, 2016. "Scope and precedent: judicial rule-making under uncertainty," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 28(3), pages 353-384, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:20:y:2012:i:03:p:329-350_01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pan .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.