Partisan affiliation alone poorly predicts state supreme court rulings on school finance.

Evidence

One might also expect that the justices’ political views would explain the different rulings on such a controversial policy issue. But it is not clear that these views exerted much direct influence on decisions. Take, for example, the Texas school finance case. The opinion of the court was written by Justice Oscar Mauzy, a Democrat who had formerly chaired the state senate’s education committee. One might easily attribute his vote for the reform of school finance to his background and political perspective. Yet, if political backgrounds and views directly determined votes, one would not have expected the other eight members of the Texas Supreme Court—five Democrats and three Republicans—to join Mauzy’s opinion. The New Jersey Supreme Court’s rulings in Robinson v, Cahill and in Abbott v. Burke also defy explanation in partisan terms. Although the justices included both Democrats and Republicans, both decisions were unanimous. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3304

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the course theme of how competing values shape doctrine and whether judges are political actors; connects to debates over attitudinal versus legal models of judging.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the distinction between formal partisan identity and the legal/interpretive factors that actually drive decisions.