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Charles Franklin and Liane Kosaki are awarded the 2009 Lasting Contribution Award - 7/28/2009
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The Lasting Contribution Award of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association is given annually for a book or journal article, 10 years or older, that has made a lasting impression on the field of law and courts. The Committee for this year's award was chaired by Elliot Slotnick of The Ohio State University and included Vanessa Baird of the University of Houston, Virginia Hettinger of the University of Connecticut and Keith Whittington of Princeton University. We received numerous nominations of both book length studies and articles that have remained important parts of the law and courts canon for over a decade. Our decision was not an easy one, and there are many fine candidates for the award still out there, which underscores the intellectual health of our subfield. The winner of this year's Lasting Contribution Award of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association is an article published 20 years ago in the American Political Science Review, co-authored by Charles H. Franklin and Liane C. Kosaki, "Republican Schoolmaster: The U.S. Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and Abortion." As noted by the article's nominators, this piece was the first, systematic empirical portrayal of the impact of Supreme Court decisions on national public opinion. Franklin and Kosaki found that while Court decisions did, indeed, have the ability to alter public opinion, they did not, necessarily, always do so in the way scholars typically predict. Rather than simply moving opinion in the direction of its rulings, the Court's decisions could actually polarize public opinion. In this case study, attitudes toward discretionary abortion became more extreme after Roe v. Wade on both sides of the issue's divide. Prior to the work of Franklin and Kosaki, research had generally failed to consider how divisive decisions might be mediated by other factors such as political discussion networks. In this instance, their theoretical framework and methodological skills enabled them to uncover important patterns that other scholars had overlooked. Their work was not only well grounded theoretically and carefully analyzed, it relied on national public opinion data from both before and after the Court's decisions--the "gold standard" in public opinion research. Their research reinvigorated the study of the relationship between courts and public opinion within the subfield and encouraged scholars to think more critically and in a more sophisticated fashion about the ways in which the public might respond to the Court. Indeed, virtually all of the current scholarship on the relationship between courts and public opinion cites this article and owes it a considerable intellectual debt.
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