Replication data for: The Supreme Court During Crisis: How War Affects Only Nonwar Cases

Does the U.S. Supreme Court curtail rights and liberties when the nation's security is under threat? In hundreds of articles and books, and with renewed fervor since September 11, 2001, members of the legal community have warred over this question. Yet, not a single large-scale, quantitative study exists on the subject. Using the best data available on the causes and outcomes of every civil rights and liberties case decided by the Supreme Court over the past six decades and employing methods cho sen and tuned especially for this problem, our analyses demonstrate that when crises threaten the nation's security, the justices are substantially more likely to curtail rights and liberties than when peace prevails. Yet paradoxically, and in contradiction to virtually every theory of crisis jurisprudence, war appears to affect only cases that are unrelated to the war. For these cases, the effect of war and other international crises is so substantial, persistent, and consistent that it may surprise even those commentators who long have argued that the Court rallies around the flag in times of crisis. On the other hand, we find no evidence that cases most directly related to the war are affected. We attempt to explain this seemingly paradoxical evidence with one unifying conjecture: Instead of balancing rights and security in high stakes cases directly related to the war, the Justices retreat to ensuring the institutional checks of the democratic branches. Since rights-oriented and process-oriented dimensions seem to operate in different domains and at different times, and often suggest different outcomes, the predictive factors that work for cases unrelated to the war fa il for cases related to the war. If this conjecture is correct, federal judges should consider giving less weight to legal principles outside of wartime but established during wartime, and attorneys should see it as their responsibility to distinguish cases along these lines. The related paper and software we used: Daniel Ho, Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Elizabeth Stuart, \"Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Improving Parametric Causal Inference, (Article: PDF | Abstract: HTML | Software: MatchIt). There is also a greatly abbreviated version of the paper written for an undergraduate audience: Epstein, Lee; Daniel E. Ho; Gary King; and Jeffrey A. Segal, \"The Effect of War on the Supreme Court,\" in Samuel Kernell and Steven S. Smith, eds. (3rd ed). Principles and Practice in American Politics: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006 (Article: PDF). See also: International Conflict; Casual Inference

当国家面临安全威胁时，美国最高法院会削减公民权利与自由吗？数百篇文章与著作中，法律界学者围绕这一问题展开了激烈辩论，且自2001年9月11日事件以来，相关讨论热度更甚。然而，目前尚无针对该主题的大规模量化研究。本研究依托过去六十年来美国最高法院审结的所有公民权利与自由案件的成因与判决结果的最优可用数据，并采用专为该问题设计并调试优化的分析方法，经分析发现：当国家安全面临危机时，大法官们削减公民权利与自由的概率显著高于和平时期。然而颇具悖论性的是，这一结果与几乎所有危机司法理论相悖：战争似乎仅会影响与战争无关的案件。对于此类案件，战争及其他国际危机的影响如此显著、持久且一致，即便那些长期主张“危机时期法院会与政府同频共振”的评论者，也可能会感到意外。另一方面，本研究未发现任何证据表明与战争直接相关的案件会受到此类影响。我们尝试用一个统一的假说来解释这一看似矛盾的现象：在与战争直接相关的高风险案件中，大法官并未直接权衡权利与安全，而是转而致力于保障民主分支的制度性制衡。由于权利导向与程序导向的维度似乎在不同领域、不同时段发挥作用，且往往指向不同的判决结果，因此对与战争无关的案件有效的预测因素，在涉战案件中便不再适用。若该假说成立，联邦法官应考虑减少对非战时确立但形成于战时的法律原则的考量，而律师则应将此类案件的区分工作视为自身职责。本研究使用的相关论文与软件如下：Daniel Ho、Kosuke Imai、Gary King与Elizabeth Stuart，"匹配作为改进参数化因果推断的非参数预处理方法"（论文：PDF | 摘要：HTML | 软件：MatchIt）。另有一篇面向本科生的精简版论文：Lee Epstein、Daniel E. Ho、Gary King与Jeffrey A. Segal，"战争对最高法院的影响"，收录于Samuel Kernell与Steven S. Smith主编（第3版）《美国政治的原则与实践：经典与当代读本》，华盛顿特区：国会季刊出版社，2006年（论文：PDF）。另可参考：国际冲突；Casual Inference