Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions
| dc.contributor.author | Blake, William D. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hacker, Hans | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hopwood, Shon | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-07-27T16:26:26Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-07-27T16:26:26Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015-08-13 | |
| dc.description.abstract | We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court’s decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36% less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16% worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court’s docket imposes a legally-irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | We dedicate this article to H.W. Perry who has been inspired in each of us a love for the Supreme Court of the United States as an institution. The authors express our gratitude to Ryan Black and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank our research assistants who were most helpful in data gathering efforts–Ryan Mullenix, Ann Marie Metzner Hopwood, Jessicah Rauch, Nikki Clark, and Bryant Moy. This project funded through a Faculty Association Research Award grant from Arkansas State University. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Social Science Association. | en_US |
| dc.description.uri | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lasr.12165 | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 38 pages | en_US |
| dc.genre | journal articles preprints | en_US |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/m2vzdw-pqlt | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Blake, William and Hacker, Hans and Hopwood, Shon R., Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions (August 13, 2015). Law and Society Review, Volume 49, Issue 4 (2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/19244 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Wiley | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Political Science | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Faculty Collection | |
| dc.rights | This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author. | |
| dc.rights | This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Blake, William and Hacker, Hans and Hopwood, Shon R., Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions (August 13, 2015). Law and Society Review, Volume 49, Issue 4 (2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. All rights reserved. | |
| dc.title | Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions | en_US |
| dc.type | Text | en_US |