Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court

Abstract

There are three general models of Supreme Court decision making: the legal model, the attitudinal model and the strategic model. But each is somewhat incomplete. This book advances an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that incorporates variables from each of the three models. In examining the modern Supreme Court, since Brown v. Board of Education, the book argues that decisions are a function of the sincere preferences of the justices, the nature of precedent, and the development of the particular issue, as well as separation of powers and the potential constraints posed by the president and Congress. To test this model, the authors examine all full, signed civil liberties and economic cases decisions in the 1953–2000 period. Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court argues, and the results confirm, that judicial decision making is more nuanced than the attitudinal or legal models have argued in the past.

The Nature of Legal Change on the U.S. Supreme Court: Jurisprudential Regimes Theory and Its Alternatives

“…When discussing JRT and legal dynamics more generally, it is important to note that there are essentially two theories being presented: a theory of legal change and a theory of decision making as a result of the change. While theories of judicial decision making typically require analyzing justices’ votes (Segal and Spaeth ; see, though, Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall ), we contend that when studying legal change, analyzing the Court's case outcomes is crucial. After all, the Court's decisions determine winners and losers and provide the official legal policy in a given case .…”

“…One drawback of JRT is that it considers just one of multiple forms of legal change—drastic change occurring as a result of a landmark precedent, with decision making more or less stable before and after a new regime is created. Certainly, legal change can be gradual or quite stable as well, as described by Pacelle's () account of how issues move through stages of development as a result of cycling interactions among the Supreme Court, lower courts, and litigants (see also Baird ; Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall ). New issues appear episodically and inconsistently at first, and doctrine remains unstable and idiosyncratic.…”

The Sum of its Parts: How Supreme Court Justices Disparately Shape Attention to Their Opinions

“…In their seminal work, Hansford and Spriggs (2006) find that the U.S. Supreme Court's preferred policy positions and treatments of Court opinions strongly influence both future Supreme Court and lower court responses to these opinions. A number of important studies demonstrate that law exerts a meaningful influence on the U.S. Supreme Court (see, e.g., Black and Owens, 2009; Lindquist and Klein, 2006; Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall, 2011; Richards and Kritzer, 2002). While these studies greatly improve our understanding of the impact of the Supreme Court as an institution, relatively little is known about how the tendencies of individual justices in how they craft their majority opinions promulgate sustained policy influence.…”

Presidential Rhetoric and Supreme Court Decisions

“…To investigate whether presidential statements about judicial decisions occur primarily before or after the Court hands down its opinions, we searched for “Supreme Court” using the online Public Papers of the Presidents database available at the American Presidency Project () . Our data span from January 1953 to August 2012, thus representing the eras of the modern presidency (e.g., Neustadt ) and Supreme Court (e.g., Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall ). After locating each time the president mentioned the Supreme Court, we determined whether the president referenced a Supreme Court case and, if so, identified the Supreme Court case discussed in each speech.…”