The Situation of Constitutional Beliefs – Abstract

Joshua Furgeson, Linda Babcock, and Peter Shane have a new article that will be of interest to many readers of the Situationist: “Do a Law’s Policy Implications Affect Beliefs About Its Constitutionality? An Experimental Test,” 32 Law Hum. Behav. 219 (2008). Here’s the abstract.

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Although a substantial empirical literature has found associations between judges’ political orientation and their judicial decisions, the nature of the relationship between policy preferences and constitutional reasoning remains unclear. In this experimental study, law students were asked to determine the constitutionality of a hypothetical law, where the policy implications of the law were manipulated while holding all legal evidence constant. The data indicate that, even with an incentive to select the ruling best supported by the legal evidence, liberal participants were more likely to overturn laws that decreased taxes than laws that increased taxes. The opposite pattern held for conservatives. The experimental manipulation significantly affected even those participants who believed their policy preferences had no influence on their constitutional decisions.

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For some related Situationist posts, see “The Political Situation of Judicial Activism,” “Justice Thomas and the Conservative Hypocrisy,” “The Motivated Situation of Morality,” “Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning,” “The Situation of Reason,” and “A Convenient Fiction.”