Issues, Agendas, and Decision Making on the Supreme Court

1996 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin T. McGuire ◽  
Barbara Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Agenda Building ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The U.S

In the process of agenda setting, the U.S. Supreme Court is limited to selecting from among only those cases brought before it. Despite this limitation, the justices possess considerable discretion and can reshape the issues in a case as a means of advancing their policy preferences. With data drawn from the Court's opinions, we find that, over the past twenty-five years, the justices have evinced a frequent willingness to expand the issues on their plenary docket and resolve questions not formally presented by the parties. We conclude that, notwithstanding informal norms that disapprove of this practice, issue fluidity is an important component in a continuous program of agenda building.

U.S. Supreme Court Decision-Making and the Free Exercise Clause

1993 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Ignagni
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Free Exercise Clause ◽  
Attitudinal Model ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Free Exercise Of Religion ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. Supreme Court, at various times, has changed the constitutional tests it claimed to use in order to settle free exercise of religion disputes. These changes in official doctrine and the manner in which many cases have been decided have left the Supreme Court open to much criticism from legal scholars. This study differs substantially from previous work in this area. It uses a fact-attitudinal model to analyze the cases from the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts. Its findings indicate that these decisions are, generally, explainable and predictable.

Agenda-Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Owens ◽  
James Sieja
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The U.S

Understanding the conditions under which the Supreme Court sets its agenda is crucial to understanding Supreme Court behavior. After all, before the justices make any decision on the merits of a case, they must first decide whether to hear it at all. This chapter analyzes Supreme Court agenda-setting. It begins by describing the process justices employ to select cases to review. It examines how parties file certiorari petitions, the certiorari pool used to provide guidance to the justices, and the conferences in which justices vote to grant or deny review to cert petitions. The chapter then discusses four explanations political scientists have provided to explain the conditions under which justices set the agenda. The article concludes by examining limitations of existing scholarship and providing suggestions for future scholarship.

The Constrained Court

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Bailey ◽  
Forrest Maltzman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
American Law

How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? This book combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. The book shows how two types of constraints have influenced the decision making of the modern Court. First, the book documents that important legal doctrines, such as respect for precedents, have influenced every justice since 1950. The book finds considerable variation in how these doctrines affect each justice, variation due in part to the differing experiences justices have brought to the bench. Second, it shows that justices are constrained by political factors. Justices are not isolated from what happens in the legislative and executive branches, and instead respond in predictable ways to changes in the preferences of Congress and the president. This book shatters the myth that justices are unconstrained actors who pursue their personal policy preferences at all costs. By showing how law and politics interact in the construction of American law, this book sheds new light on the unique role that the Supreme Court plays in the constitutional order.

Agenda Setting and Case Selection on the U.S. Supreme Court

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Lane ◽  
Ryan C. Black
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Fundamental Step ◽  
Case Selection ◽  
Setting Process ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Grant Review ◽  
The U.S

The Supreme Court’s docket consists of thousands of cases each term, with petitioners hoping at least four justices will be compelled to grant review to their case. The decision to move a case from their docket to their calendar for oral arguments and all intermediate steps is what is known as the agenda-setting process. This is a fundamental step in the judicial process, as the Supreme Court cannot establish precedent and affect policy change without first deciding to review.

Supreme Court Decision Making: New Institutionalist Approaches. Edited by Cornell W. Clayton and Howard Gillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 344p. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-212
Author(s):  
Michael McCann
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Collective Response ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
The U.S

The editors of this timely volume announce at the outset that their aim is to provide a forum for recent scholarship that reacts critically to the previous generation of behavioralists who, since the 1950s, have analyzed the U.S. Supreme Court as little more than an aggregate of the relatively stable and identifiable policy preferences held by individual justices. Specifically, these essays pose a collective "response by a succeeding generation of Supreme Court scholars who are trained in political behavioralism but who have rediscovered the value and importance of understanding institutional contexts" (p. 12).

scholarly journals Judicial Globalization in the Service of Self-Government

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin S. Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
The Past ◽  
General Utility ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The World ◽  
Domestic Law ◽  
The U.S

For at least the past several decades, judges around the world have been looking beyond their own states' jurisprudence to international law and the decisions of foreign courts in order to apply domestic law. This widespread practice is part of a phenomenon that Anne-Marie Slaughter calls “judicial globalization.” The American judiciary, however, has exhibited a distinct diffidence toward the use of comparative and international law to decide domestic cases, a diffidence that extends to many elected officials as well… .Various defenses of the Supreme Court's reliance on international and comparative sources have been made, not least by some of the Supreme Court justices themselves. None of the defenses, however, have met the democratic objections head-on. Instead, justifications have mainly defended the general utility of referencing additional sources rather than the specific legitimacy of referencing sources from outside the U.S. legal system. The defenses to date fall short for at least two sets of reasons. They fail to grapple with legitimate concerns about the practice. In consequence, they offer no reasons for those opposed to this practice to reconsider their resistance.

Summary of Results

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Kuenzler
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Trademark Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government ◽  
Networked Economy

The persuasive force of the accepted account’s property logic has driven antitrust and intellectual property law jurisprudence for at least the past three decades. It has been through the theory of trademark ownership and the commercial strategy of branding that these laws led the courts to comprehend markets as fundamentally bifurcated—as operating according to discrete types of interbrand and intrabrand competition—a division that had an effect far beyond the confines of trademark law and resonates today in the way government agencies and courts evaluate the emerging challenges of the networked economy along the previously introduced distinction between intertype and intratype competition. While the government in its appeal to the Supreme Court in ...

scholarly journals Immunizing the Flock: How the Pandemic Court Rewrote Religious Freedom

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Paul Baumgardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
The U.S

When coronavirus began to descend upon the United States, religious freedom advocates across the country sounded the alarm that citizens’ religious practices and institutions were under threat. Although some of the most extreme arguments championed by these advocates were not validated by our legal system, many were. This article explores the underappreciated gains made by religious freedom advocates before the U.S. Supreme Court over the past year. As a result of the “Pandemic Court”, religious freedom in the United States has been rewritten. This promises to radically change the educational, employment, and health prospects of millions of Americans for the rest of the pandemic and long afterwards.

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