Academic Round-Up

Terri Peretti (Santa Clara University) and Alan Rozzi (Santa Clara University) have posted “Modern Departures from the U.S. Supreme Court: Party, Pensions, or Power” on SSRN, see here.  Consistent with the majority of empirical studies to date, Peretti and Rozzi find that modern departures from the Court do not show a tendency for Justices to strategically retire in order to ensure an ideologically-desirable successor.  In other words, the model does not show that Justices consider the partisan affiliation of the President or the Senate majority in making retirement decisions.  Instead, among other things, the Justices are predictably “influenced in their retirement decisions by their sense of importance and utility on the Court, a critical component of the self-esteem, prestige, and professional satisfaction they naturally seek to safeguard and enhance.”  This is a really interesting study.

Matthew L.M. Fletcher (Michigan State University College of Law) has posted “Factbound and Splitless: Certiorari and Indian Law” on SSRN, see here.  This article engages in an empirical study of 162 certiorari petitions that were filed in Indian Law cases between 1986 and 1994.  To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically analyze certiorari petitions in tribal cases.  Professor Fletcher concludes that petitions brought by tribes during the period studied were often denied by the Court as factbound and splitless, while state and local governments received much more favorable treatment at the certiorari stage in tribal cases.  Although I must confess that I do not agree with some of the conclusions reached in this paper, Fletcher’s article is thought-provoking and interesting.