Measuring Change on the Supreme Court: Examining Alternative Models

Constitutional interpretation is clearly a dynamic process. Understanding the Warren Court's decisions may not be sufficient in trying to explain the Burger Court's. Previous quantitative attempts to examine how judges or courts have changed, however, have one crucial shortcoming: they fail to control for the nature of the cases being decided. By employing a fact model of search and seizure decision making, Warren and Burger Court cases were analyzed to determine the dynamics of the Burger Court's conservatism. Using probit analysis to test various predisposition and variable change models, it was determined that the model which assumed that each Nixon/Ford appointment added similarly to the Burger Court's conservatism worked best. Furthermore, it was concluded that the change seemed to be in the Court's predisposition to find searches reasonable, rather than in its treatment of particular facts.