![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Increased social diversity generally, and in the minority legal advocacy group environment specifically, the significance of Supreme Court decisions, and the ability to analyze inter-minority groups' behavior through amicus filings provide an important, unique venue for examining inter-group coalitional activity. With evidence covering 35 years of amicus brief filings by Black, Latino, and Asian advocacy groups, this article demonstrates that: (1) the minority legal advocacy context changed substantially with the rise of Asian advocacy group participation in amicus filings; (2) the emergence of a third minority advocacy group increases coalitional activity between the other two minority groups, ostensibly by signaling the existence of a “minority interest” independent of issue area and other prominent indicators, (3) there is no evidence of conflict, and (4) several factors identified in other general analyses exerted little to no effects. The article contributes to understanding inter-minority group relations generally, and in the legal arena more specifically.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The pursuit of basic rights is related to equalizing access to the means of material acquisition, but the purposive narrative for minority interest groups distinguishes them from primarily or solely materially focused groups.
2 The ideological/normative predispositions of these groups emphasize the pursuit of greater civil rights and governmental protection of equal treatment and opportunity for minority groups (cf. Wasby Citation1995, 6–7).
3 The groups utilized to select our sample of cases are listed below, and include highly visible and active national organizations as identified by the authors. State and local branches of these organizations are included on the assumption that while these groups have discretion on their local issues, the national interest groups have significant control over SCOTUS strategies. To collect briefs in which these prominent groups participated, we used the LexisNexis search engine to compile a list of Supreme Court amicus briefs where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Black Legal Defense Fund (NAACP-LDF), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Black (NAACP), and the Urban League (UL) represented Black interests; the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) represented Latino interests; or the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), and the Asian American Justice Center represented Asian interests by signing an amicus brief. Given the paucity of research on the issues of interest here, this is a plausible and appropriate set of groups to examine at this point in the theoretical and empirical endeavor.
4 There are differing views in the literature about whether only co-signing, and not separate filings on the same side, are indicative of cooperation and should be examined as such (see Box-Steffensmeier and Christenson Citation2014, 85 fn. 19). Additionally, several works have explored the efficacy of co-signing versus separate filing strategies by organizations seeking to influence the court (Collins Citation2004). We also do not consider cases where one of the groups used to compile our sample are named parties in the case. Parties to the case, who are named as litigants, are not permitted to file briefs, and thus our focus on coalitions within the amicus filing process would not apply to those cases. It is reasonable to infer that a brief filed on a case when another group is a named party would be classified as some level of coalitional activity, but it adds a distinct type of coalition that is beyond the scope of this study (but will be examined in future analysis).
5 Groups may undertake other strategies. Various forms of less visible and difficult to measure activity – such as the timing of briefs, assessing group capacities, agreeing on a division of labor, and the decision to co-sign versus separate signing – have been described in other works.
6 To determine if the modeling approach we rely on adequately deals with the potential for similar factors leading groups to file a brief in the first place, as well as engage in coalitional activity, we tested for the presence of correlated errors in the selection and outcome stages with a Heckman Sample Selection model which accounts for both processes. The results of these models are reported in the Supplemental Materials. In all cases, we could not reject the null hypotheses that the errors in the selection and outcome models were uncorrelated (or independent) and therefore each step can be modeled separately.
7 Each of the 222 cases identified in the full sample was coded based on whether at least one advocacy organization explicitly identifying as representing a racial/ethnic group participated with advocacy organizations representing other minority groups. For instance, if any Black advocacy organization co-signed a brief with any Latino group, but no Asian groups filed a brief, the case was coded as shallow cooperation. For several cases, more than one type of interaction occurred (e.g., Black and Latino organizations co-signing a brief while another Latino organization filed separately). We coded these multiple category cases at the highest level of cooperation/concurrence observed, such that the previous example would be coded as shallow cooperation rather than independence.
8 While our coding procedure of recording the highest level of coalitional activity for each case may underestimate some independent filings by individual advocacy groups, the data still suggest that there are more instances of explicitly cooperative behavior than pure concurrence.
9 See the supplemental materials for the distribution of cases across issues for each group.
10 A full listing of the case subject classifications can be found in the Supplemental Materials. In additional analyses, we found no effects for categories outside of Civil Rights and Immigration in our dyadic models. This seems to be due to categories with very few cases and thus large standard errors or a few cases that were determined by other factors. Thus, we choose to solely focus on the theoretically driven Civil Rights and Immigration policies and collapse all other categories into the baseline, excluded, category.
11 Removing the non-racial/ethnic group support variable did not change the substantive results reported here, with the exception of less precise, but still positive, relationship (p < .11) between Civil Rights policies and cooperation of Black groups on Latino interest cases (Model 1a in ).
12 While we cannot clearly identify specific reasons for the rise of Asian participation, it may follow from a distinct shift in SCOTUS’ attention to issues of immigration and civil rights. Immigration issues accounted for just 0.88% of all SCOTUS cases prior to 1999, but more than doubled in the post-1999 period to 2.12%. Civil rights cases rose from 20.27% to 23.97%. These two issues accounted for half of all cases on which Asian groups filed. Changing the cut-point by a year did not alter the results.
13 Given that of the thirteen immigration cases in the sample, only one had a brief filed by a Black Group, we also re-ran the analyses while excluding immigration case with results reported in the Supplemental Materials. Removing immigration cases from the sample did not change the substantive conclusions from .