American Politics & Public Policy Workshop: Jeffrey Segal, Stony Brook University
Jeffrey Segal
SUNY Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Department Chair, Stony Brook University
Abstract: This paper follows up on an experimental study by Sood, who found that Mechanical Turk subjects employed motivated reasoning to conclude that inevitable discovery was more likely in her high egregiousness condition (selling heroin to high school students) than in her low egregiousness condition (selling marijuana to terminally ill senior citizens with cancer). Using observational methods, we find that controlling for the intrusiveness of a search (following Segal 1984) and the ideology of the judge (following Cameron, Segal, and Songer 2000) U.S. Court of Appeals judges are more likely to admit evidence when the crime is more egregious.
Jeffrey Segal is SUNY Distinguished Professor, and chair of the Political Science Department at Stony Brook University. In 2011-12 he was Senior Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University and held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Segal is best known, with Harold Spaeth, as the leading proponent of the attitudinal model of Supreme Court decision making. Segal has twice won the Wadsworth Award for a book (The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, 1993, Cambridge University Press, with Harold Spaeth) or article (“Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981, APSR, 1984) 10 years or older with lasting influence on law and courts. Segal’s work on the influence of precedent (Majority Rule or Minority Will, Cambridge University Press, 1999, with Harold Spaeth) won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book on law and courts. His work on the influence of strategic factors on Supreme Court decision making won the Franklin Burdette Award from APSA. With Lee Epstein, Kevin Quinn and Andrew Martin he won Green Bag’s award for exemplary legal writing. He has also won an award sponsored by the American Bar Association for innovative teaching and instructional methods and materials in law and courts. Segal was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.