摘要：A host of scholars have argued that decision making in lower courts is at least partially determined by decision making in the U.S. Supreme Court. In other words, Supreme Court jurisprudence in a given area influences the way that the lower courts decide similar cases. This may seem like an unremarkable assertion given the principle of stare decisis and the expectation that lower courts are bound by decisions made by higher courts. Nonetheless, there are intriguing evidentiary omissions with regard to what we know about compliance with Supreme Court precedent. In particular, despite the voluminous expenditures of scholarly time and attention, we do not know how the High Court’s influence on the federal circuit courts compares with its influence on the state courts of last resort. We might well assume that the Supreme Court has far greater impact on the U.S. Courts of Appeals since those courts are more closely constrained to follow Supreme Court precedent by virtue of their position in the federal judicial system. In contrast, state courts of last resort are not direct members of the federal judicial system and are therefore more divorced from Supreme Court influence. Further, while we know that the Supreme Court hears very few cases from the federal courts of appeals, it hears an even smaller percentage of cases most recently decided by the state supreme courts. It seems, therefore, that the motivation to abide by Supreme Court rulings is dramatically reduced in the state courts and, accordingly, that a reasonable expectation is that Supreme Court precedent will fare worse in structuring decision making on state courts in comparison to decisions on the federal circuit courts. Contrary to these expectations, however, Martinek found that state court decisions actually do comport closely with Supreme Court policy in the area of search and seizure. In fact, Martinek found that the state supreme courts decide their cases in greater accord with High Court prescriptions than do the federal circuit courts. Benesh and Martinek’s findings are also suggestive in the area of confession, the area of law we consider in this Article. They found that state high courts are influenced by Supreme Court policy, even after controlling for the influence state elites (who are instrumental in staffing the bench) have on these courts. They characterize this influence as a legal one, rather than one driven by a fear of reversal, because only those facts the Court
