Vol. 3, No. 7 (July, 1993)
THE SUPREME COURT AND LEGAL CHANGE by Lee Epstein and Joseph F.
Kobylka. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992. 417 pp.
Reviewed by Susan Sterett, Department of Political Science,
University of Denver.
What brings about change in appellate legal doctrine? Epstein and
Kobylka take this as their central problem and explore three
possible answers through case studies of the death penalty and
abortion. Their three partly rival hypotheses are that changes in
court personnel, changes in the political environment, and the
strategy of groups can account for legal change. They thread the
deployment of legal argument throughout their account from these
different perspectives, but the hypothesis concerning the
strategy of groups bears the primary burden of taking into
account the significance of legal argument. The conclusion of the
book is unusual for behaviorists to have reached: they argue that
legal arguments and doctrine, as framed for the courts by the
groups that appear before them, fundamentally shape the results
in law. Herein lies the strength of the book as well as the
limits of an account of legal doctrine that insists doctrine is
deeply distinct from political argument. Epstein and Kobylka
argue that they are in part going against the "conventional
wisdom that political factors are responsible for doctrinal
development and alteration" (p. 310).
Epstein and Kobylka want to distinguish legal argument from the
political environment and from ideology. Indeed, in the
conclusion they insist that legal argument, the material traded
between justices and lawyers, matters more than ideology. At the
same time, they claim that for some justices ideology is an
overriding factor. Their examples include Justice Brennan and
Marshall in the death penalty cases, who were clearly not
persuadable on questions of the constitutionality of the death
penalty.
Their rich and detailed discussion of the death penalty allows
one to question the distinctions they make between legal
arguments and ideology. Legal arguments are not simply arguments
from precedent, according to Epstein and Kobylka. They include
how to interpret precedent as part of a set of beliefs about good
policy. Epstein and Kobylka include a sensitive discussion in
both areas of what it means to have legal argument matter.
Clearly both the death penalty and abortion decisions, like most
appellate decisions, contained the potential seeds of their own
demise. In some cases that is true because lawyers take it as
their job to make ambiguity where perhaps beforehand we would not
have seen any. But cases carry more openness than even that
implies. FURMAN V. GEORGIA (1972), popularly understood to have
abolished the death penalty, actually only struck down how it was
usually administered, as Epstein and Kobylka carefully discuss. A
plurality in FURMAN held that as it was administered the
imposition of the death penalty was rare and random enough to be
unconstitutionally arbitrary. As Chief Justice Burger said in his
dissent, the opinion seemed to allow the states to write and
administer constitutional death penalty laws (pp. 78-80). That
left the way open to states to redraft their laws and lawyers to
relitigate them. The victory for death penalty abolitionists was
hardly clear cut legally, as Epstein and Kobylka argue, which
means that its demise is not necessarily dramatic legal change.
Rather, at least some appellate legal doctrine can be seen as a
case of the courts testing the waters, so that change from a
decision could be overdetermined because the initial decision was
ambiguous anyway.
Substantial social science evidence was used to address
arbitrariness, the deterrent value of the death penalty, and
racial discrimination both in that case and subsequently in the
efforts to limit it. Immediately subsequent to BROWN V. BOARD,
such evidence was controversial because many considered it not to
be legal argument. By the 1970s when the death penalty was being
litigated, it was considered legal argument and Epstein and
Kobylka accept it as that. Certainly legal argument matters. But
Epstein and Kobylka accept the common distinction between legal
argument and
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politics, asking which one matters most. Their answer is
different from that of most behaviorists: legal argument, not
just politics, matters. But how is one to tell the difference
between the two? Epstein and Kobylka argue briefly that the law
did not matter to Brennan and Marshall because they remained
convinced throughout the litigation. By why can't it be that they
were convinced on legal grounds? Particularly when legal grounds
include evidence of racial discrimination and a commitment to
"evolving standards of decency," a key legal argument
in the area as an interpretation of the due process clauses of
the fifth and fourteenth amendments. That is a legal argument
because appellate court judges use it, just as social science
evidence is now routinely material for legal argument. However,
none of that material is clearly distinguishable from the
political environment or ideas about politics. That Brennan and
Marshall remained convinced about the death penalty is not
evidence against the argument that legal doctrine matters in
persuasion.
Epstein and Kobylka take a similar tack in abortion. ROE was not
a clear declaration of a right for all women to choose to have an
abortion in all circumstances. That has become crystal clear
subsequent to ROE, but the limits in the case are clearly there.
Blackmun argued for the importance of the doctor to what he saw
as a medical decision, not a decision of absolute right. The
division of pregnancy and interests into trimesters during which
interests were balanced differently also meant that ROE did not
represent a declaration of right. While Epstein and Kobylka are
right to acknowledge the retreat from ROE, they again overstate
it. They argue that O'Connor was persuadable had the arguments
been better framed, for she acknowledged a right to an abortion.
She did, but she was well within the ROE framework in not seeing
it as any kind of absolute right.
Epstein and Kobylka argue that other justices probably could
never have been persuaded, offering another opportunity to
consider their distinction between legal argument and political
conviction. They note that Rehnquist and White were always
opposed to abortion, and they call this a choice determined by
ideology not law. Similarly, it was entirely predictable that
Justice Scalia would want to dismantle ROE. Indeed, in WEBSTER he
castigated the majority for dismantling ROE without actually
saying that was what they were doing. In noting Scalia's likely
pro-life stance, Epstein and Kobylka note "The newest
justice had been appointed in 1988, three years into the Reagan
and Meese "litmus test" scheme; he was a Catholic; and
he was a man...." (p. 297) Such an approach downplays the
significance of legal argument for such a person and the factors
they mention make little of legal doctrine. But the justice who
wrote the majority opinion in ROE was a man. There are no
significant differences of opinion on abortion by gender among
the general public. Not all Catholics oppose abortion as a matter
of public policy; Governor Cuomo is only the most outstanding
public figure in that position. Furthermore, as careful feminist
work has shown, the matter of religion and pro-life beliefs is
somewhat complicated by the fact that many activists CHOSE their
religion rather than being born into it, and chose it in part for
the traditionalism of the beliefs embodied in the religion.
Political beliefs ought to be taken to have reasons. In turn,
given the openness of legal argument in the United States, those
reasons can probably be part of or translated into legal
argument.
If one wishes to argue that legal argument is a significant
factor in decisionmaking, there is no reason to say it only
matters for swing justices such as O'Connor. Instead, one can
take the legal arguments as mattering to justices such as Scalia
as well. First, the "litmus test" can be seen as a
political and legal evaluation for appointment, just as it was
offered. Second, like Rehnquist, Scalia has been committed to
federalism and has a perspective on constitutional construction
that is skeptical of fundamental rights. These are outlines of
what an account of Scalia's jurisprudence would look like. They
are legal and political concerns, not easily separable. An
account of judicial decisionmaking that takes legal argumentation
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seriously needs to do so for all justices rather than invoking it
as a residual category. Differences can be accounted for within
the confines of legal argument. Second, as this rich work shows,
the confines of legal argument in appellate courts in the United
States are not all that confining, an interesting point in
itself. In abortion cases subsequent to ROE, the justices
received a range of amicus briefs. The pro-choice ones were
intended to show the wide base of support for ROE (pp. 269-278).
They made arguments, and Epstein and Kobylka argue they made
mistakes in those arguments, but part of legal argument was
showing the base of support or criticism of ROE. In the cases
subsequent to FURMAN, while the public reception of FURMAN was
probably important, the evidence concerning the use of the death
penalty was considered by the groups presenting to be crucial.
All of this is encompassed within legal argumentation.
This book provides a rich and useful account of the voting
patterns in the Supreme Court, solicitor general strategy, public
opinion and group efforts in assessing doctrinal changes in two
politically contentious areas. Its mustering of evidence allows a
reader to understand and consider carefully the arguments
offered. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is that it
invites reconsideration of the distinction between law and
politics that it uses. In its strength of attending closely to
two areas of law also rests an important weakness. For in its
focus on change it perhaps overstates what needs to be explained.
Legal change has not been as dramatic as Epstein and Kobylka on
the surface claim. However, this rich account allows just that
kind of evaluation, allowing us to open the question of legal
change beyond the book's focus on the Supreme Court.
Copyright 1993