State Supreme Courts and Opinion Content:Self-Plagiarism and the Lower Courts

• In Event: Legal Texts

Abstract

Over time, the workload and expectations of judges have changed significantly due to a variety of factors including an increased number of cases and institutional changes. In turn, these changes have had an impact on the quality and content of judicial opinions. My dissertation seeks to identify mechanisms that state Supreme Court judges may be utilizing to save time during the opinion writing process. Building on the work of Corley (2008) and Savchek and Bowie (2016), this paper looks at opinion content to determine to what extent judges may be mirroring lower court opinion and their own repertoire of legal writing to save time. This paper utilizes original data from 1995-2004 from ten states to determine if and to what extent judges are relying on their own work or work of lower courts to save time when issuing case decisions.

Author

• Bailey Rose-Marie Fairbanks