NSF Award
1921268
Common law intermediate appellate courts have typically functioned well out of the limelight and out of public scrutiny. In recent years, however, the number of appeals within common law judiciaries have significantly increased while the number of cases heard by High Courts has remained relatively stable. In light of burgeoning caseloads, the intermediate appellate courts effectively serve as the court of last resort for the vast majority of judicial appeals. This project develops, assesses, and advances a new and innovative theoretical framework on the dynamic transmission of information between two tiers of courts across the judiciaries of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. This study represents the first comprehensive assessment of hierarchical influences on judicial decision making within a comparative context. Specifically, this project explores hierarchical interactions between lower intermediate appellate court judges and their High Court counterparts in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The comparative focus of this project presents scholars, policymakers, and practitioners with exciting, innovative, and new opportunities to explore how ideological and institutional differences within judicial systems and different tiers of the judiciary can influence decision making. This project also contributes to a broader understanding of courts in a comparative context by illustrating that scholars cannot easily assume that frameworks developed for American courts are automatically transportable to other countries. Beyond contributions to the academic sphere, the proposed project has broad policy and social impacts. Understanding how judges behave in this dynamic decision making process is necessary for understanding how law and policy is developed and how institutional designs seemingly condition judicial decision-making behavior. <br/><br/>The extensive data collection, both quantitative and qualitative, for the project will facilitate the sharing of a vast database of information on appellate courts and hierarchical responses to Supreme Court precedents for a variety of future analyses. The database of intermediate court decisions assembled for this project provides a valuable supplement to the National High Courts Database. The combination of new and reliable data on two tiers of the courts has the potential to foster extensive new analyses for academic faculty, students, and legal professionals. By providing comparable data on the intermediate courts over a substantial period of time, this study will create a rich resource that will enable future research on judicial policy making in a variety of settings. Such data will benefit both established scholars as well as their students including doctoral students throughout related disciplines seeking data for comparative judicial dissertation projects. This project also incorporates the insights gained from in-depth interviews with judges to provide a more nuanced understanding of the way judges understand their approach to decision making. These resources hold significant promise for many analyses beyond this project.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
