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Given their place within the judicial hierarchy, judges on lower courts face a complex array of challenges including heavy caseloads, mandatory dockets, and the threat of Supreme Court reversal. Despite the extensive scholarship on the American courts, little is known about judicial interactions in comparative contexts. We articulate and evaluate a framework for lower court adherence to Supreme Court precedents by leveraging a cross-national design in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with similar systems but meaningful institutional variability. We find that the mechanisms promulgating adherence to Supreme Court precedents do not substantially vary across design or institutional context. Instead, our results demonstrate that legal factors exert a consistent, homogeneous effect on lower court compliance across judicial systems. Our work offers new and important implications for studies on law and courts and comparative institutions, more broadly.
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Strategic Adaptation in a Crisis: Treatment Court Responses to COVID-19
This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845165
- PAR ID:
- 10488940
- Publisher / Repository:
- Law and Social Inquiry
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Law & Social Inquiry
- ISSN:
- 0897-6546
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 28
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2022.93
