@misc{189621,
  author = {Isaac Cape and Jonathan P. Kastellec},
  title = {Precedent and Bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court: An Empirical Evaluation},
  abstract = {<p>Which justices control the content of opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court? This is a central question in the study of judicial politics, yet both theoretical and empirical debates persist about whether judicial policy is most likely to fall at the location of the median justice, the median member of the majority coalition, or the opinion author. We propose a new empirical strategy to disentangle these competing theories of judicial influence. We use the Court{\textquoteright}s negative treatments of its own precedents to see which theory best predicts when the Court is likely to move away from an existing precedent (for example, by overruling or distinguishing a precedent). Specifically, we measure distance from a precedent-setting court to a precedent-treating court based on each theory (e.g. distance from the median justice in Roe to the median justice in Dobbs). The results show that the two median theories better predict negative treatments than theories of author influence; furthermore, the bulk of evidence places more weight on the locus of judicial power being at the median of the majority coalition.\&nbsp;</p>},
  year = {2026},
}