A Comparative Analysis of State and Federal Judicial Behavior: The Reapportionment Cases

The literature discussing the responses of lower court judges to decisions of the United States Supreme Court is limited, and the few comparative analyses of state and federal judicial behavior have tended to be speculative rather than empirical. It has been suggested that a controversial Supreme Court decision is likely to be supported more strongly by federal judges than by state judges, that state courts will probably construe a Supreme Court mandate more narrowly than will federal courts, and that federal courts can be expected to move in a direction hinted at by the Court more aggressively than state courts. Since all federal judges are appointed for life, it is only logical that they should be more independent of local pressures than state judges, many of whom are elected, or appointed for limited periods. The fact that state and federal judges owe their appointments to different levels of the political party hierarchy, and the historical fact that federal judges are less likely to seek future political office than are state judges, suggest a similar conclusion. Finally, the very fact of being a federal judge may produce a sense of identification with the Supreme Court which state judges would not share.