Lower Court Reactions to Supreme Court Decisions: A Quantitative Examination

This article tests the widely assumed proposition that the greater the original support for a decision at the Supreme Court level, the greater the subsequent compliance with that decision by the lower courts. Five indicators of support were used in the analysis-size of the voting majority, size of the opinion majority, number of dissenting justices, number of dissenting opinions, and author of the majority opinion. Indexes of compliance, evasion, and discord based on Shepard's Citations listings of lower court reactions to 1961-1963 Supreme Court decisions from 1963 to 1967 were used as measures of lower court responses to Supreme Court decisions. The analysis failed to support any of the hypothesized relationships.