Political Science and Legal Scholarship on the Supreme Court

On Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha of St. John’s University School of Law has an excellent post providing commentary on the work of political scientists in the “judicial politics” field, especially on the Supreme Court, see here.

For many years, the work of legal scholars and political scientists could not have been further apart, with many legal scholars ignoring the work of political scientists and vice versa. A longstanding criticism by political scientists is that legal scholars spend too much time case-crunching and too little time examining the internal and external factors that motivate judicial decisions. Meanwhile, legal scholars criticize political scientists for failing to see the nuances in the law, and focusing too much attention on those other factors (such as a judge’s political ideology).

Although I am personally a huge fan of the work of political scientists, and rely on it quite a bit in my own scholarship, some studies conducted by political scientists suffer from another flaw: the failure to account for the outliers in the data. This failing may in part explain the longstanding divergence between the two disciplines. Many studies or theories by political scientists fit some subset of cases that a court decides, but literally no theory can account for all of them, particularly when it comes to studying a complex institution like the Supreme Court.

The increasing convergence between the two disciplines and the interdisciplinary nature of legal scholarship, however, will allow us to understand the behavior of courts and judges more fully over the long-term. We are now seeing a number of political scientists participate in legal symposia, and a number of legal scholars present papers at political science conferences. Increasing interdisciplinary work can only improve the work product of both disciplines.