Beyond Initial Adoption: Modeling Sustained Relative Compliance to Supreme Court Precedent in the U.S. Court of Appeals, 1980-2024
I ask what factors condition the timing with which U.S. Court of Appeals implement new Supreme Court precedent. While prior work has demonstrated compliance as static, I introduce Sustained Relative Compliance (SRC) as a dynamic measure that identifies the first month at which circuits cite an overruling precedent more than the one it displaces, arguing that compliance is a gradual process conditioned by ideology and case salience. To test this framework, I use a Cox proportional hazards model that captures all circuits monthly risk of acheiving SRC for old-new precedent pairs from 1980-2024 for 180 months.