Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court’s Gender Discrimination Cases

Abstract

For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court’s equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer the concept of jurisprudential regimes as a useful device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cutpoint of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.