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This book, authored by two leading scholars of the Supreme Court and its policy making, systematically presents and validates the use of the attitudinal model to explain and predict Supreme Court decision making. In the process, it critiques the two major alternative models of Supreme Court decision making and their major variants: the legal and rational choice. Using the US Supreme Court Data Base, the justices' private papers, and other sources of information, the book analyzes the appointment process, certiorari, the decision on the merits, opinion assignments, and the formation of opinion coalitions. The book will be the definitive presentation of the attitudinal model as well as an authoritative critique of the legal and rational choice models. The book thoroughly reflects research done since the 1993 publication of its predecessor, as well as decisions and developments in the Supreme Court, including the momentous decision of Bush v. Gore.

Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

We examine Supreme Court-circuit court interactions from a principal-agent perspective, employing a fact pattern analysis to determine the extent to which circuit courts follow their own policy preferences versus the extent that they follow the policy dictates of the Supreme Court. We then examine whether monitoring by the Supreme Court can affect those interactions. We find that the courts of appeals are highly responsive to the changing search and seizure policies of the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the strong independent effect of the ideologies of the judges gives evidence that judges do find opportunities to shirk to satisfy their own policy interests. We also find strong evidence that litigants play an active role in influencing monitoring by the Supreme Court.

Past empirical studies of factors affecting public support for the Supreme Court suggest: (1) the Supreme Court's decisions are more often congruent than incongruent with public opinion; (2) public response to decisions influences subsequent levels of institutional support; (3) negative reactions more strongly affect institutional support than do positive reactions; and (4) support is subject to value-based regeneration due to a link between the Court and basic democratic values. Although a wealth of empirical studies underlies these propositions, such findings appear inconsistent with the observed character of aggregate public support for the Court-namely, that levels of support tend to be high and that support is quite stable over time. To explore this tension, we construct a dynamic model of public support for the Supreme Court, guided by our four empirically derived propositions. Model analysis and estimation demonstrates that an active and occasionally controversial Supreme Court can maintain aggregate public support that is both high and stable.

Preface 1. Introduction: Supreme Court policy making 2. Models of decision making 3. A political history of the Supreme Court 4. Staffing the Court 5. Getting into court 6. The decision on the merits process 7. Opinion assignment and opinion coalitions 8. The Supreme Court and constitutional democracy 9. The impact of judicial decisions 10. Conclusion Appendix Index.

The last century has seen little change in the conduct of litigation before the United States Supreme Court. The Court's familiar procedures – the October Term, the opening-answering-reply brief format for the parties, oral argument before a nine-member Court – remain essentially as before. The few changes that have occurred, such as shortening the time for oral argument, have not been dramatic.\nThe Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of amicus curiae activity in the Supreme Court over the last fifty years, tracking the increase in amicus filings and in the Court's citation and quotation of such briefs. Part II traces the emergence of the Court's open door policy toward amicus filings starting in the late 1950s, and the impact of this policy on the frequency of amicus filings. Part III reviews the conflicting results of previous studies that have sought to measure the influence of amicus briefs on the Supreme Court. Part IV posits three models of judicial behavior that underlie commentary about amicus curiae briefs and sets forth the hypotheses about amicus influence associated with each model. Part V summarizes the major findings of our empirical survey. Part VI closes with some reflections on the factors that may account for the surge in amicus curiae activity in the Supreme Court in the last fifty years.

Most research suggests that the mass public knows very little about the Supreme Court and, consequently, that decisions do not affect attitudes toward the Court. I argue that where there is sufficient access to information about Court cases and when the issues are perceived as important, people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions.

The Supreme Court, like all political institutions, requires some minimal level of support because, as the high bench performs its political and constitutional roles, the justices must on occasion stand against the winds of public opinion. With data from a recent national survey, we reexamine the levels, sources, and explanations of public support for the Supreme Court. Since racial differences in attitudes toward the Court are so great, we focus here only on the attitudes of white U.S. citizens. Our purposes are both substantive and methodological. On the substantive front, we examine changes in the etiology of support. We investigate the traditional explanations of diffuse support, but, more important, we introduce and evaluate the power of a new set of variables, political values. These political values do an uncommonly good job of predicting attitudes toward the Court. In addition, we devote particular attention to the important role of as supporters of the Court. These leaders relate to the Court in a fashion very different from that of the mass public. On the methodological front, we offer an alternative means of thinking about and capturing diffuse support for the Court among the mass public. We close with speculations about the process by which diffuse support for the Court changes over time and, more generally, the implications of attitudes among the mass public and opinion leaders for the functioning of the Supreme Court.

How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.

We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite them from 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patterns in citations within and across cases to create importance scores that identify the most legally relevant precedents in the network of Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measures are superior to existing network-based alternatives and, for example, offer information regarding case importance not evident in simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validity of our measures by showing that they are strongly correlated with the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring how central a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it can be used to measure other legal concepts.

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the public's ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

This study suggests that state supreme court justices act strategically to minimize electoral opposition. In order to appease their constituencies, justices who have views contrary to those of the voters and the court majority, and who face competitive electoral conditions will vote with the court majority instead of casting unpopular dissents on politically volatile issues. Using probit, models were estimated of the effects of several types of electoral forces on death penalty votes from 1983 through 1988 in four southern state supreme courts. Results indicate that single-member districts, beginning at the end of a term, prior representational service, narrow vote margins and experience in seeking reelection encourage minority justices to be attentive to their constituencies by voting in accordance with constituent opinion. In essence, constituency influence in state supreme courts is enhanced by competitive electoral conditions and experience with electoral politics.

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Robert G. McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the U.S. Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court. For this new fifth edition, Sanford Levinson extends McCloskey's magisterial treatment to address the Court's most recent decisions. As in prior editions, McCloskey's original text remains unchanged. In his historical interpretation, he argues that the strength of the Court has always been its sensitivity to the changing political scene, as well as its reluctance to stray too far from the main currents of public sentiment. In two revised chapters, Levinson shows how McCloskey's approach continues to illuminate developments since 2005, including the Court's decisions in cases arising out of the war on terror, which range from issues of civil liberty to tests of executive power. He also discusses the Court's skepticism regarding campaign finance regulation; its affirmation of the right to bear arms; and the increasingly important nomination and confirmation process of Supreme Court justices, including that of the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor. The best and most concise account of the Supreme Court and its place in American politics, McCloskey's wonderfully readable book is an essential guide to the past, present, and future prospects of this institution.

This article1 covers the role of the Supreme Courts in the “Scandinavian” countries. In the Scandinavian meaning of the word, “Scandinavia” connotes only Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but internationally, the same term is often used to describe a geographical area including Finland and Iceland as well. In this essay, “Scandinavia” is equivalent to “the five Nordic countries.” The next part, Section 2, contains a general background and some similarities and differences regarding Scandinavian procedure(s) and the role of the Supreme Courts. Section 3 is a discussion and analysis of two general questions: what purposes (“public” and “private”) are the Supreme Courts intended to achieve, and what purposes are they really achieving in practice? The analysis is made against the background of the role of courts and the four purposes of procedure in general. Section 4 contains a short summary and some concluding remarks. In Section 5, the factual background is added as an Appendix.

It is commonly assumed that Supreme Court justices' votes largely reflect their attitudes, values, or personal policy preferences. Nevertheless, this assumption has never been adequately tested with independent measures of the ideological values of justices, that is, measures not taken from their votes on the Court. Using content analytic techniques, we derive independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. These values correlate highly with the votes of the justices, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.

We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals' personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when presented as likely, shifted perceived norms and personal attitudes toward increased support for gay marriage and gay people. Next, a five-wave longitudinal time-series study using a sample of 1,063 people found an increase in perceived social norms supporting gay marriage after the ruling but no change in personal attitudes. This pattern was replicated in a separate between-subjects data set. These findings provide the first experimental evidence that an institutional decision can change perceptions of social norms, which have been shown to guide behavior, even when individual opinions are unchanged.

Participation as amicus curiae has long been an important tactic of organized interests in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze amicus curiae briefs filed before the decision on certiorari and assess their impact on the Court's selection of a plenary docket. We hypothesize that one or more briefs advocating or opposing certiorari increase the likelihood of its being granted. We test this hypothesis using data from the United States Reports and Briefs and Records of the United States Supreme Court for the 1982 term. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the presence of amicus curiae briefs filed prior to the decision on certiorari significantly and positively increases the chances of the justices' binding of a case over for full treatment—even after we take into account the full array of variables other scholars have hypothesized or shown to be substantial influences on the decision to grant or deny .

As if to debunk the conventional wisdom, the 101st Congress busied itself with efforts to override numerous Supreme Court decisions construing federal statutes. Successful legislation overrode eight recent opinions interpreting federal statutes. Overturning an older decision, another law for the first time rejected a Supreme Court interpretation discriminating against bisexuals, gay men, and lesbians. Even abortive override efforts in the 101st Congress illustrated Congress' attention to the Court's statutory interpretation cases. Most prominent among the unsuccessful override efforts was the vetoed Civil Rights Act of 1990, which would have overturned nine recent decisions narrowly construing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and related statutes. A similar Civil Rights Act of 1991, however, was enacted into law by the 102d Congress.

In recent years, the justices of the Supreme Court have ruled definitively on such issues as abortion, school prayer, and military tribunals in the war on terror. They decided one of American history's most contested presidential elections. Yet for all their power, the justices never face election, and hold their offices for life. This combination of influence and apparent unaccountability has led many to complain that there is something illegitimate—even undemocratic—about judicial authority. In The Will of the People, Barry Friedman challenges that claim by showing that the Court has always been subject to a higher power: the American public. Judicial positions have been abolished, the justices' jurisdiction has been stripped, the Court has been packed, and unpopular decisions have been defied. For at least the past sixty years, the justices have made sure that their decisions do not stray too far from public opinion. Friedman's pathbreaking account of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court—from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Rehnquist Court in 2005—details how the American people came to accept their most controversial institution and, in so doing, shaped the meaning of the Constitution.