Academic Round-Up

Ward Farnsworth (Boston University School of Law) has posted “The Use and Limits of Martin-Quinn Scores to Assess Supreme Court Justices, With Special Attention to the Problem of Ideological Drift” on SSRN, see here. This is an interesting (and short!) paper and a reply to a forthcoming paper to be published in the Northwestern Law Review by Professors Lee Epstein, Jeffrey Segal, Andrew Martin, and Kevin Quinn, see here. The main paper by Epstein, Segal, Martin, and Quinn has received considerable press coverage, see here, including in a recent issue of the ABA Journal. The use of Martin-Quinn scores, because they are dynamic, have been used widely in political science papers in recent years to measure judicial ideology. In his piece, Professor Farnsworth explains the Martin-Quinn scores, and notes several important limitations of them. I have my own doubts, not about the presence of ideological drift among Supreme Court Justices (which seems obvious) or the utility of Martin-Quinn scores, but about the use of Martin-Quinn scores to measure such drift in the main paper.

Timothy O’Neill (John Marshall Law School) has posted “Scalia’s Poker: Puzzles and Mysteries in Constitutional Interpretation” on SSRN, see here. The paper might be too abstract for some of our readers, but Professor O’Neill uses the social science dichotomy of puzzles and mysteries to examine the interpretive approaches taken by various Justices, with particular focus on Justices Scalia and Breyer. He also examines the impact that the varying approaches to constitutional interpretation can have on relations within a collegial court. The paper is forthcoming in Constitutional Commentary.