It would be a mistake to assume, however, that what is true for the Supreme Court is true for other courts and other issues. There has been somewhat less research focused on state courts and lower federal courts than there has been on the Supreme Court, but the body of that research is still considerable. And when we look at the conclusions of that research, we see that legal doctrine appears to play a considerably larger role in judicial decision-making than the more extreme of the Realists supposed. Although the self-reporting of judges probably exaggerates the effect of formal law on their decisions, the admittedly oversimplified conclusion that emerges from the research is that even in lower courts a range of nonlegal factors plays a larger role than the traditional model supposes, but that legal factors explain considerably more of lower court than of Supreme Court decision-making.

Unknown, Frederick Schauer - Thinkin…, loc. 257