Legal Doctrine and Political Control
本文建立模型，将法律原则视为上级法院控制下级法院及其判决结果的政治工具，分析在不同政治意识形态对齐程度下，上级法院如何选择确定或不确定的原则来优化控制效果。
We model legal doctrine as an instrument of political control by higher courts over lower courts and the case outcomes they produce. We focus on the choice between determinate and indeterminate doctrines within a hierarchy of courts where political–ideological alignment between lower and higher courts varies. We show that the choice over doctrinal determinacy depends on the distribution of cases, the distribution of litigants, judicial types, and the level of policy alignment between higher and lower court judges. The model suggests the optimal doctrinal choice for a high court, given the political–ideological alignment between the high court and the lower court, the control characteristics of doctrines themselves, and the matching of doctrines to litigant pools. This has implications regarding preference divergence within the judicial hierarchy, the interaction of different doctrines, and interplay between doctrinal specificity and doctrinal reach.