The Judicial Bookshelf D. Grier Stephenson, Jr. From the beginning, the Supreme Court has been ofabsorbing interest not only to the Jus tices themselves and the litigants in cases they have decided, but to sitting and aspiring Presidents, members ofCongress, state offi cials,journalists, polemicists, and, occasion ally, the electorate. Remarkably, as Charles Warren’s classic history demonstrated nearly seventy-five years ago,1 with but a handful of notable exceptions,2 the recorded commentary on the Court through much of the nineteenth century derived almost entirely from such sources. For a long time, published matter about the Court was mainly ad hoc: eventdriven , advocative, and frequently partisan. Systematic study of the Court, as distin guished from the law it declared, came later, emerging little more than a century ago, shortly before the births offuture Justices Felix Frank furter, Hugo L. Black, and Robert H. Jackson in 1882, 1886, and 1892, respectively, or about a hundred years before Sandra Day O’Connor reached the High Bench. As this phenomenon unfolded, the Court and its decisions were per ceived to be too multifaceted, complex, and consequential to remainthe province ofa single academic discipline. Students ofthe older dis ciplines oflaw,jurisprudence, and history were soon joined by those who embraced political science. This subject acquired official status as a discrete discipline upon the organization ofthe American Political Science Association in 1903,3 only four years before the birth ofthe ChiefJustice, Warren E. Burger, whose retire ment in 1986 opened the way for the appoint ment ofJustice Antonin Scalia. Ever since, political scientists within the field ofpublic law and what came to be called the judicial process have been joined at the head with historians and legal scholars because of a common interest: judicial decisions, the Justices who make them, and the institution within which they work. Historians and stu dents of politics in particular have wanted to JUDICIALBOOKSHELF 151 know what courts do, not because of the client-centered necessity to win cases but because of the reason-centered demand to comprehend courts as components ofthe po litical system. Moreover, they have sought to proceedbeyond or beneaththe “what” by seek ing also to explainjudicial decisions, to probe the why as well. This doubled-barreled objec tive accounts formuch ofthe multidisciplinary character of judicial studies today, as these scholars look across their own fields into those tilledby statisticians, philosophers, economists, psychologists, and sociologists.4 The result has been a flourishing literature thatreflects notmerely a variety ofold and new methodologies, but a tacit or express reliance on one or more ofat least four explanatory ap proaches—some would say “models”—to the study ofthe Supreme Court (and other courts, too). The first ofthese is the “legal” approach, which emphasizes the influence oflaw, whether constitutional or statutory, including the accu mulated mass ofjudicial constructions. The second is “attitudinal,” which looks to the role ofajudge’s values, whether religiously, philo sophically, orpoliticallybased, as principal vari ables. “Small-group analysis,” the thirdapproach, is applied to collegial bodies such as the Su preme Court where decisions are the product of a group, not a single individual. The op erating assumption is that, along with the in fluences of legal rules and the judges’ values, judgments and the writing ofmajorityopinions are interactive; they reflect the bargaining and give-and-take ofcollective decisionmaking. A fourthperspectivetakes “institutional and pro cess” influences into account. Unlikethe White House or Congress, appellate tribunals like the Supreme Court are almost entirely reactive. Cases arise and judges respond within a pro cess that shapes the development and presen tation ofissues and sets the parameters fortheir resolution. Thus the existence of the Court’s certiorarijurisdiction injects apreliminaiydeci sion into every decision the Justices reach on the merits: deciding what to decide. A varia tion on the fourth approach, sometimes called “neo-institutional,” points to concern for the political strength and integrityofthe Court. For example, ajustice might prefer not to accept a case for review if the issue presented might entangle the Bench in the politics of a presi dential campaign. In different ways, each of the books sur veyed in this review seems premised on the utility of at least one of these approaches. Moreover, each of...