Legal Constraint in the US Courts of Appeals

Existing evidence of law constraining judicial behavior is subject to serious endogeneity concerns. Federal circuit courts offer an opportunity to gain leverage on this problem. A precedent is legally binding within its own circuit but only persuasive in other circuits. Legal constraint exists to the extent that use of binding precedents is less influenced by ideology than use of persuasive precedents. Focusing on search and seizure cases, I construct a choice set of published circuit cases from 1953 to 2010 that cite the Fourth Amendment. I model the use of precedent in cases from 1990 to 2010, using matching to ensure that binding and persuasive precedents are otherwise comparable. The less visible decision of which cases to cite shows no evidence of legal constraint, while there is consistent evidence that the more readily observable act of negatively treating a cited precedent is constrained by the legal doctrine of stare decisis.