This paper, which just appeared in the SSRN Empirical & Experimental Journal, sheds some light on the cultural components of reasonableness in Supreme Court jurisprudence: Dan Kahan (Yale), Dave Hoffman (Temple), and Donald Braman (GWU Law), "Whose Eyes are You Going to Believe? An
Empirical (and Normative) Assessment of Scott v. Harris". Here is the abstract:
This paper accepts the unusual invitation to see
for yourself issued by the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769 (2007). Scott held that a police officer did not violate the Fourth Amendment when he deliberately rammed his car into that
of a fleeing motorist who refused to pull over for speeding and instead
attempted to evade the police in a high-speed chase. The majority did not
attempt to rebut the arguments of the single Justice who disagreed with its
conclusion that no reasonable juror could find the fleeing driver did not pose
a deadly risk to the public. Instead, the Court uploaded to its website a video
of the chase, filmed from inside the pursuing police cruisers, and invited
members of the public to make up their own minds after viewing it. We showed
the video to a diverse sample of 1,350 Americans. Overall a majority agreed
with the Court’s resolution of the key issues, but within the sample there were
sharp differences of opinion along cultural, ideological, and other lines. We
attribute these divisions to the psychological disposition of individuals to
resolve disputed facts in a manner supportive of their group identities. The
paper also addresses the normative significance of these findings. The result
in the case, we argue, might be defensible, but the Court’s reasoning was not.
By insisting there was only one reasonable view of facts, the Court needlessly
invested its decision with culturally partisan overtones that detracted from
the decision’s legitimacy.
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