A Vital National Seminar and a Super Legislature: Decision Making on the Modern Supreme Court

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Scholars have long been concerned with the factors that impact Supreme Court decision making. Legal, attitudinal, and strategic factors dominate the discussion, but they are seldom considered in an integrated model. We examine institutional decision making by the modern Supreme Court (1953-2000) as a function of these factors, and hypothesize that institutional decision making is a function of both substantive preferences and structural considerations. We also investigate the extent to which the relative impact of these factors may vary as a function of constraints imposed on the Court. Our results show that while attitudinal considerations are the most important, they are not the only factors relevant to Supreme Court decision making and their relative impact varies by whether the case is constitutional or statutory.