Biography

James Spriggs is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Political Science.

Spriggs' research interests fall broadly within the area of law and politics and empirical legal studies.  Much of his research focuses on explaining the dynamics of appellate court decision making and impact.  His research is especially concerned with how institutions (i.e., formal rules or informal norms) shape the choices that judges make.  This perspective focuses on how, in attempting to craft law consistent with their policy preferences, judges are constrained by institutional rules endogenous and exogenous to courts.  For instance, his book (with Paul Wahlbeck and Forrest Maltzman), Crafting Law on the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game (Cambridge University Press) examines how internal rules on the Court lead justices to act strategically and bargain, negotiate, and compromise.

Based on the research in his book, The Collegial Game, he (with Paul Wahlbeck and Forrest Maltzman) has launched a website, The Supreme Court Opinion Writing Database (located at http://supremecourtopinions.wustl.edu.), that houses information regarding the memos and draft opinions the Justices circulated to their colleagues in the course of the opinion-writing process in cases decided during the Burger Court. The interaction among the Justices as reflected in the documents available on this website allows one to view in detail how the Justices negotiated with one another over the course of a case's deliberations.  The website contains: (1) A dataset archive containing an electronic dataset with information on each of the 48,524 memoranda and opinion drafts that Justices circulated to their colleagues during the opinion-writing process (e.g, each memo is coded for sender, recipient, and type of memo); and (2) A document archive, with a pdf file containing images of each document in each case.  Importantly, the document archive is searchable by such search terms as Justice's name, case name, type of memo, date, and the like.

In recent years, he has principally focused on a variety of topics aimed at modeling law and legal development.  His book (with Thomas G. Hansford), The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court (Princeton University Press), provides a comprehensive theory of legal change and couples it with empirical analyses spanning more than 50 years.  The theoretical model in the book argues that two variables principally drive legal change:  (1) the justices' policy goals; and (2) an element of the norm of precedent that he terms "legal vitality," which he conceptualizes as the legal authoritativeness of a precedent.  Importantly, the model and empirical results demonstrate that the justices' ideological goals and the norm of precedent are not mutually exclusive considerations, as is often suggested in the literature.  Rather, each of these factors is important as the justices attempt to set policy that reflects their preferences and encourages the downstream societal effects they desire.  His book also speaks to a central debate in the judicial politics literature by showing that precedent can constrain the choices the justices make.  He specifically demonstrates that the justices respond to the need to legitimize their policy choices by following more legally authoritative cases.  This effect is most apparent when considering that the justices are more likely to positively interpret a precedent they ideologically disfavor if that precedent is particularly legally vital.

His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Law and Society Review, American Politics Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, Political Analysis, Georgetown Law Journal, Emory Law Journal, Washington University in St. Louis Law Review, The Houston Law Review, the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, and the Illinois Law Review.

He is also the recipient of two National Science Foundation Grants.  His most recent NSF grant funds a project that examines the development of the norm of stare decisis in the United States.

Spriggs' current research projects include:  using network analysis of legal citations to understand legal development in the United States (with Paul Wahlbeck and Tim Johnson), determining whether and how judges influence public perception of court opinions (with John T. Scott and James R. Zink), examining decision making at the European Court of Justice (with Matt Gabel), understanding the relationship between the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals (with Tom Hansford), and modeling the depreciatoin of U.S. Supreme Court precedent (with Ryan Black).

Research Interests

American Politics; Empirical legal studies; Judicial process and politics; U.S. Supreme Court

Selected Publications

• 2013. "The Information Dynamics of Vertical Stare Decisis." Journal of Politics. Forthcoming. (with Tom Hansford and Tony Stenger).
• 2013. "The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (with Ryan C. Black)
• 2009. "Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals' Views of Court Opinions." Journal of Politics 71(3):909-925 (with John T. Scott and James R. Zink).
• 2006. The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (with Thomas G. Hansford).
• 2006. "The Influence of Oral Arguments on the U.S. Supreme Court." American Political Science Review 100(1):99-113 (with Timothy R. Johnson and Paul J. Wahlbeck).
• 2001. "Explaining the Overruling of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent." Journal of Politics 63(August): 1091-1111 (with Thomas G. Hansford).
• 2000. Crafting Law on the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game. New York: Cambridge University Press (with Forrest Maltzman and Paul J. Wahlbeck).
• 1998. "Marshalling the Court: Bargaining and Accommodation on the Supreme Court." American Journal of Political Science 42(January):294-315 (with Forrest Maltzman and Paul J. Wahlbeck).

Awards

• Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, Washington University in St. Louis, 2009.
• American Judicature Society Award for the best paper presented the previous year at an annual meeting, presented by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, 2002.
• C. Herman Pritchett Award for the best book published on law and courts, presented by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, 2001.
• Edward S. Corwin Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of Public Law, presented by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, 1995.

Courses

• Topics in American Politics: Judicial Politics, graduate course
• American Political Institutions, graduate course
• Comparative Judicial Politics: graduate course
• Constitutional Politics in the U.S.: undergraduate course
• Defendant's Rights: undergraduate course
• The Politics of the U.S. Supreme Court: undergraduate course

Attached Files

• American Political Institution Sylabus
• "The Citation and Depreciation of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court"
• "The Information Dynamics of Vertifcal Stare Decisis"