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While Congress can attempt to overrule constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by initiating the constitutional amendment process, an amendment is rarely a practicable option. Instead, Congress regularly tries to modify the impact of constitutional decisions with ordinary legislation. I analyze policy‐based responses to the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions that were initiated in Congress between 1995 and 2010. For each responsive proposal, I consider the relationship between the proposed legislation and the Court's legal holding and the relationship between the proposal and the public policy associated with the Court's decision. I find that Congress enjoys considerable success in reversing the policy impacts of the Court's decisions but is limited in its ability to overcome the Court's legal rules.

Though there has been a substantial amount of research on the strategic behavior of legal actors, the literature is rife with conflicting findings. We contribute to this debate by examining whether U.S. court of appeals judges dissent for the purpose of inviting en banc and/or Supreme Court review. We consider key challenges associated with the empirical modeling of strategic behavior related to the selection of an appropriate unit of analysis for study and the consequences of introducing multicollinearity into statistical models. We explore these issues by examining the dissenting behavior of court of appeals judges from 1970-2002. Our findings indicate that court of appeals judges strategically dissent, and that this behavior is seldom captured by traditional quantitative analyses of judicial behavior. Though our focus is on court of appeals judges, we are confident our conclusions inform studies of strategic behavior in a variety of contexts.

Existing studies of executive orders tend to focus on two issues: how the frequency of executive orders has changed over time and whether the nature of presidential power has changed such that we should reconsider Neustadt's thesis that bargaining is the essence of presidential power. Although institutionalists bemoan the literature's focus on the "personal presidency," no study of unilateral uses of power has taken into account the systematic influence of presidents' personalities. Instead, studies that consider why some presidents issue more executive orders than others focus on contextual factors, not attributes of the presidents. In this article we address this gap in the literature by examining whether presidents' personality traits significantly influence their propensity to issue executive orders. The results of our analysis demonstrate that both personality and institutional factors play a significant role in presidents' decisions to act unilaterally.