Tonja Jacobi (Northwestern University - School of Law) has posted Competing Models of Judicial Coalition Formation and Case Outcome Determination on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Forming a coalition on a multi-judge panel involves an inherent trade-off between coalition maximization and ideological outcome optimization. Much scholarship is premised on assumptions about how judges make that trade-off; this paper formally explores three posited modes of judicial decision-making. The models are: a minimum winning coalition model, representing an attitudinalist conception of judicial decision-making; a maximum winning coalition, capturing the effect of norms of joint opinion writing and collegiality; and a strategic model, incorporating the concept of the credibility of a marginal justice's threat to defect from a majority coalition. Each model yields comprehensive predictions of case outcome positions and coalition sizes under given court compositions; the Rehnquist court is examined here. The models are then operationalized as measures for empirical use. The relative merits of the three measures are assessed by rerunning Baird and Jacobi's analysis of judicial signaling on case outcomes, using each measure.
Highly recommended.
