State Supreme Courts and the Effects of Statutory Constraint

Abstract

Do state supreme court judges render decisions according to their ideological preferences, or are they constrained by the language of state statutes? Using data from the Judge-Level State Supreme Court Database, the authors analyze the votes of individual judges from 1995 to 1998 to determine whether their behavior is constrained by legislation. The results indicate that more detailed language (resulting in statutes with higher word counts) significantly limits the discretion afforded to liberal judges while simultaneously facilitating the ideological voting of their conservative colleagues.