US courts of appeals and state supreme court responses to Arizona v. Gant: a study in judicial impact

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a judicial impact study of the 2009 Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Gant, which modified the rules police have to follow when conducting vehicle searches incident to arrest. Following up on an earlier study, this research draws on principal-agent theory to consider the differences between the responses of US courts of appeals panels to Gant with decisions of state supreme courts and attempts to understand why defendants win on Gant issues 44% of the time in state supreme courts, compared with 15% of the time in the US courts of appeals. A detailed content analysis of the opinions in 102 appellate courts decisions in which Gant could have potentially served as a controlling precedent revealed an interesting set of differences between state and federal courts. Federal judges were more likely than state supreme court justices to actively seek alternative rationales that allowed them to avoid the exclusionary rule.