The Role of State Supreme Courts in Judicial Policy Making: Escobedo, Miranda and the Use of Judicial Impact Analysis

Abstract

SHE RECOGNITION that we need to look beyond the Supreme Court in order to obtain a realistic understanding of the American judicial system is not new. In the 1950s Jack Peltason' and Walter Murphy2 conceptualized this system in terms of a bureaucratic structure in which the Supreme Court, much like any high level decision-maker, faces a problem of achieving acceptance of and compliance with its decisions by lower level officials under its jurisdiction. While this approach has been utilized in research on the lower federal courts,3 it has not been generally applied to state courts. Rather the work on state courts has been limited to individual courts or comparisons of a small number of state courts without regard for their relationship to the Supreme Court.4 Paralleling this development, there has been a growing concern with the analysis of the impact of Supreme Court decisions, a concern with the effect of these decisions on the institutions and the problems to which they are directed. Despite the large number of impact studies that have been produced to date, however, state supreme courts have been largely ignored.5 This omission is particularly unfortunate in the field of criminal procedure, an area in which the Supreme Court has been attempting to institute fundamental changes at the trial court level. State supreme courts are of vital significance in this area for they interpret Supreme Court decisions and apply them within their own states. In this capacity the state supreme courts serve as a mediating force between the Supreme Court and its decisions at the national level and the trial courts, which are subject to local pressures that often run counter to the decisions of the Supreme Court. If changes in criminal procedure are to be meaningful at