Abstract
Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy‐making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural‐collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five‐justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case‐level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case‐related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nation's high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities.
Highlights
As Harold Lasswell (1936) put it nearly eight decades ago, politics is who gets what, when and how
Scandinavian Political Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd ©on2b01e5haTlfheofANutohrodrisc
Oriented model of the decisional behaviour of an individual Norwegian Supreme Court justice – that is, the individual justice’s vote is a function of his or her preferences for making ‘good’ law, pursued in a collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the nature of the appeal being considered
Summary
As Harold Lasswell (1936) put it nearly eight decades ago, politics is who gets what, when and how. Oriented model of the decisional behaviour of an individual Norwegian Supreme Court justice (see Baum 1997; Epstein & Knight 2013) – that is, the individual justice’s vote is a function of his or her preferences for making ‘good’ law, pursued in a collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the nature of the appeal being considered. We searched the judicial Lovdata.no database for all Supreme Court decisions in five-justice panels since 1963 that addressed an economic issue and that pitted a public party against a private party. In generalized linear models the lowest level residual variance (i.e., within-case variance) does not enter the model as a separate term, but is estimated to be 3.29.12
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