Supreme Court Justices as Strategic Decision Makers: Aggressive Grants and Defensive Denials on the Vinson Court

Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence

“…Many of these studies, however, find that strategic agenda setting is ''situational'' (Baum 1997, 80). Affirmminded justices strategically anticipate the Court's likely merits ruling (Benesh, Brenner, and Spaeth 2002;Boucher and Segal 1995;Brenner 1979). These affirm-minded justices must be more strategic than reverse-minded justices, the argument goes, because they have more to lose if they miscalculate (Benesh, Brenner, and Spaeth 2002).…”

“…All this is to say that a policy-motivated justice's vote is a function of which outcome is closer to her-the expected policy location of the merits decision or the status quo policy. Accordingly, we expect that a policy-motivated justice will vote to grant review to a case when the ideological distance between the justice and the expected policy from the merits decision is smaller 2 While a few studies incorporate some sense of a status quosuch as those analyzing aggressive grants (Benesh, Brenner, and Spaeth 2002;Boucher and Segal 1995;Brenner 1979)-they do not theoretically model and empirically test how, specifically, the status quo affects justices' votes. That is, they are unable to model whether a justice is ideologically closer to the status quo than to the expected merits outcome and how that dynamic affects their decision.…”

Competing Models of Judicial Coalition Formation and Case Outcome Determination

“…The different measures scholars rely on in undertaking empirical analysis of judicial decision-making-be it the granting of cert (e.g. Boucher and Segal, 1995) or of the influence of stare decisis (e.g. Segal and Spaeth, 1996)implicitly adopt some assumptions about how judges decide cases.…”

An Original Look at Originalism

“…While these crosstabular analyses are illuminating, they do not account for the fact thatJustices treat petitioners and respondents differently or for other important factors influencing judicial decisionmaking (Ulmer 1972;Brenner & Krol 1989;Boucher & Segal 1995). We control for this by running a multivariate analysis, consisting of two sets of logistic regressions, both using the Justices' probability of voting with the petitioner as the dependent variable.…”