Uncertain Compliance, Salient Decisions: Compliance with U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

We investigate the extent that lower courts positively treat U.S. Supreme Court precedent on their first attempt and when positive treatment is not immediate, how long the courts take to ultimately comply. We argue that previous examinations are limited because they exclusively rely on a small subset of the Court’s decisions, its overruled precedents. We contend that several factors influence how quickly lower courts positively treat a Court precedent. These include whether the Supreme Court alters an existing precedent, below, the ideological distance between the circuit and the enacting Supreme Court, and whether the Court’s decision is legally or politically salient. We examine a random sample of Supreme Court plenary and summary decisions from 1995-2005. The empirical results provide substantial support for our predictions. We find that whether the Supreme Court overturns a precedent has a significant effect on how quickly lower courts positively treat the precedent. We also find that ideological distance as well as the type of Supreme Court decision, plenary or summary, has an effect on treatment. The data suggest that legal and political salience also have a significant effect on how quickly lower courts comply. Our study offers some notable developments in the judicial compliance literature.