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Lax and Rader critique our use of the Chow test in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes on the grounds that individual justices votes are not statistically independent, which constitutes a violation of assumptions underlying the Chow test. In this response we point out that the Chow tests constituted only one part of our analysis; we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to look at the strength of the Chow tests compared to other sequential splits. Most importantly, we required that the observed statistical patterns of change be theoretically consistent with the legal changes made by the regime changing decisions; we note two areas where we did preliminary analyses that produced statistically significant results, but where those results did not make sense in light of the jurisprudence. We repeat both our Chow tests and individual interaction tests taking into account the clustering of observations. Our reanalysis provides support for some, but not all, of our original results. Adapted from the source document.

In this research note/replication, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article to the jurisprudential area of search and seizure. Given the centrality of this area of Supreme Court decision making in the core studies supporting the attitudinal model, replicating our analysis of the jurisprudential regime construct in this area provides an important test of the concept. Our results produce strong support for the proposition that post-Mapp decision making can be separated into distinct regimes, with a set of important cases decided in 1983-1984 demarcating the regimes. The predictors of decisions in the two periods are consistent with the types of changes one would expect the regime shift to produce. Our findings challenge the attitudinalists'proposition that there is at best negligible statistical evidence that law influences Supreme Court decision making.

In this article we evaluate whether the Supreme Court's much‐discussed decision in Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) signaled a lasting difference in how the justices decide administrative law cases, by comparing and testing the predictions of three distinct theories of Supreme Court behavior. The legal model predicts an increase in deference to administrative agencies. This prediction is shared by the jurisprudential regime model, which also predicts that the justices evaluate key case factors differently before and after Chevron. The attitudinal model predicts no change in the justices' behavior as a result of Chevron. Although we find that attitudes matter, the fact that we also find support for the legal and jurisprudential regime models undermines the assertion of the attitudinal model that law cannot explain Supreme Court votes on the merits.