Specialization and Authority Acceptance: The Supreme Court and Lower Federal Courts

Research on organizational behavior suggests that the authority of higher officials for their subordinates is relatively low for subordinates whose work is highly specialized. If this proposition is valid, the Supreme Court should have more limited authority for specialized federal courts than for their generalist counterparts. To test this expectation, citations to the Court's deci sions in patent law were analyzed. It was posited that the former Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), a specialized court, cited the Supreme Court in patent cases less often than did the generalist federal courts of appeals. This hypothesis was strongly supported according to several measures of citation frequency. The results emphasize the potential impact of specialization on hierarchical authority in organizations and underline the consequences of specialization for judicial behavior.