Judicial impact: The relationship between the United States Supreme Court and state courts of last resort in search and seizure decision making

The central motivating question underlying the study of judicial impact is the extent to which lower courts are, in practice and not just in word, faithful to the policy prescriptions embodied in decisions made by the United States Supreme Court. The federated nature of the American judiciary, with each state possessing a separate court system, calls particular attention to the extent to which state courts of last resort are obedient to the nation's highest tribunal. There are seemingly few resources at the disposal of the Supreme Court with which to sanction wayward state supreme courts. On the other hand, the legal culture within which judges operate, including state supreme court judges, cultivates the value of obedience to superior courts.; I examine the faithfulness of state supreme courts to the United States Supreme Court in the context of search and seizure decision making. I first compare the extent to which the same factors that are dispositive in Supreme Court search and seizure decision making are dispositive in state courts of last resort. I also examine the effect of the Supreme Court's increasing likelihood of upholding challenged searches and seizures on the likelihood of state supreme courts doing the same. Using a sample of search and seizure decisions from 1961--1990 I find that state supreme courts are largely both congruent with and responsive to the United States Supreme Court. I then develop a precedent model of automobile search and seizure decision making to more precisely test the effects of Supreme Court rulings on state supreme court decision making. Using the universe of automobile search and seizure decisions rendered by state supreme courts from 1970 to 1990, I find that they respond not only to the particulars of the cases but also to relevant Supreme Court rulings. In extending the precedent model into an integrated model that takes into account political, contextual, and institutional features in the individual states, I find that legal stimuli continue to exert some influence, though the preferences of the supreme court and electoral constituencies come into play as the dominant factors.; Collectively, these results suggest that the propensity of state supreme courts to comply with the direction of the United States Supreme Court is conditioned in meaningful ways by the political and institutional environment in the individual states. These findings comport with previous findings in the study of judicial decision making that emphasize the importance of context to understanding outcome but raise normative questions about the role of the United States Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the federal constitution.