Although scholars have established that oral arguments play a role in Supreme Court decision making, a fundamental question remains: can oral arguments change justices’ votes? Using data on the positions taken by Justices Blackmun and Powell prior to oral arguments, the authors seek to answer this question while implicitly addressing another: how effectively can attorneys persuade the Court during arguments dominated by justices attempting to persuade each other? The authors find that in a significant minority of cases, justices are persuaded to switch their vote as a result of oral argument and that high-quality attorneys play a central role in that persuasion.

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Unable to directly control the policy articulated by the Supreme Court, dissenting justices are faced with the challenge of finding alternative ways to pursue their policy goals. We argue that one strategy available to them is to use their power over the language of a dissenting opinion to increase the media attention paid to a case. Our results show that cases with negative dissents attract more media coverage, which creates a variety of mechanisms through which a dissenter’s policy preferences could be realized, such as inducing Congress to take action, influencing public debate on the issue, and provoking further litigation. This finding ultimately suggests that dissenters, while disadvantaged, are not powerless to affect legal policy.

Despite the increasing integration of world markets, most political scientists contend that governments retain much policy "room to maneuver." Moreover, citizens presumably agree to increased trade and direct foreign investment because they believe their governments can cushion the impacts of market forces. In this sense, economic globalization is compatible with democracy. Rarely, however, are data provided that demonstrate citizens appreciation for the room to maneuver, let alone their positive evaluation of it.This paper reports results of the first study of American's attitudes about the room to maneuver. Employing data from an original experiment of randomly sampled adults, we address three questions. First, who do citizens identify as most responsible for the performance of the U.S. economy, elected officials or market forces? Second, how do individual attributes affect how citizens reason about the room to maneuver? And third, what is the relationship between judgments about the room to maneuver and satisfaction with democracy?We show that while a majority of Americans believe their governments retain the room to maneuver, there exists a substantial minority-mostly Republican identifiers and more educated citizens-which does not. Both this minority and the believers in room to maneuver majority are satisfied with democracy-seemingly because Republican partisans and the more educated see the room to maneuver as undesirable; they prefer less government, the kind of government that the Bush Administration presumably represents. Finally, as regards question wording effects, the results are mixed. On the one hand, contra other studies on globalization and public attitudes, we find no evidence of priming effects. However, attributions are shaped by the response set: when given an item attributing economic performance to national or international business cycles, a plurality of respondents attribute responsibility for national economic conditions to market forces rather than to elected officials. These findings require us to reconsider current thinking in international and comparative political economy on connections between market liberalization, policy efficacy, and democratic accountability.

The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using an automated textual analysis program, we find that parties who employ less emotional language in their briefs are more likely to win a justice’s vote, a result that holds even after controlling for other features correlated with success, such as case quality. These findings suggest that advocates seeking to influence judges can enhance their credibility and attract justices’ votes by employing measured, objective language.