Grant co-authors "The Ideological Divide"

Professor Emily Grant's article co-authored with Scott A. Hendrickson and Michael S. Lynch, "The Ideological Divide: Conflict and the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Decision," has been published at 60 Cleveland State Law Review 559 (2012).

This Article bridges a gap in existing literature by evaluating, from an empirical perspective, the impact of conflict among the lower courts on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant or deny a petition for a writ of certiorari. Specifically, this Article looks at the political ideology of the lower courts involved in a split of authority on federal law and compares those positions to the political ideology of the Supreme Court itself.

This Article concludes that the ideological content of lower court opinions in a conflict case impacts the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions in a statistically significant way, and thus sheds new light on the role lower court conflict plays in whether the Supreme Court’s exercise of its discretion to grant cert. (Posted February 8, 2013)