Worldviews and Judicial Decision Making at the U.S. Supreme Court

• In Event: Reconsidering Justice Preferences and Goals on the US Supreme Court

Abstract

The Attitudinal Model asserts that U.S. Supreme Court justices decide cases based on their political ideologies (See Segal and Spaeth 2002). Many judicial politics scholars regard this model as the most powerful in predicting how the justices will vote on a case. There exist many attempts to define political ideologies. The least complex definition is that they are systems of ideas (See Ball, Dagger and O’Neill 2019, 8). Political ideologies, nonetheless, are not the only system of ideas. Worldviews are another, and their impact on political decision making remains largely unexplored. This exploratory paper examines the affect that the personal worldviews of the justices have on their court rulings using a qualitative descriptive analysis. To assess the impact of worldview, this study categorized ten justices into five dimensions of worldview articulated by Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1956) with personal memoirs written by the justices. Justice William O. Douglas’ Of Men and Mountains (2012) is one example. This study then sought linkages with the justices’ categorizations and their decisions in significant cases. Some interesting connections were discovered.


Ball, Terence, Richard Dagger, and Daniel I. O’Neill. Political ideologies and the democratic ideal. Routledge, 2019.
Douglas, William O. Of men and mountains. Read Books Ltd, 2012.
Kluckhohn, Clyde. "Toward a comparison of value-emphases in different cultures." The state of the social sciences (1956): 116-132.
Segal, Jeffrey A., and Harold J. Spaeth. The Supreme Court and the attitudinal model revisited. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Author

• Paul Lohse, Arizona State University