“The Right Result”: Attitudes, Strategy and Law in the Narrative of Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

One key problem concerning meaningful explanation of the activities of the United States Supreme Court is: how do the Justices make decisions in the cases before them? From the behavioralist perspective, attitudinalism remains the dominant model for explaining decision-making on the United States Supreme Court. A series of works uses statistical analysis, based on large datasets, to show clearly that the behavior of Justices, at least as far as their making of decisions in civil liberties cases goes, is highly predictable given a relatively small amount of information about the Justices' perceived views before their appointment to the Court.The availability and development of a major dataset – Harold J. Spaeth, United States Supreme Court Judicial Database, 1953–2001 Terms Computer File (East Lansing, MI: Program for Law and Judicial Politics, Dept. of Political Science, Michigan State University: continuously updated; downloadable from http://polisci. msu.edu//pljp) – has led to a series of increasingly comprehensive analyses of attitudinalism. See Jeffrey A. Segal and Albert D. Cover, “Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 557–65; Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Segal et al., “Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Revisited,” Journal of Politics 57 (1995): 812–23; Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).