Of the nearly five thousand cases presented to the Supreme Court each year, less than 5 percent are granted review. How the Court sets its agenda, therefore, is perhaps as important as how it decides cases. H. W. Perry, Jr., takes the first hard look at the internal workings of the Supreme Court, illuminating its agenda-setting policies, procedures, and priorities as never before. He conveys a wealth of new information in clear prose and integrates insights he gathered in unprecedented interviews with five justices. For this unique study Perry also interviewed four U.S. solicitors general, several deputy solicitors general, seven judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and sixty-four former Supreme Court law clerks. The clerks and justices spoke frankly with Perry, and his skillful analysis of their responses is the mainspring of this book. His engaging report demystifies the Court, bringing it vividly to life for general readers--as well as political scientists and a wide spectrum of readers throughout the legal profession. Perry not only provides previously unpublished information on how the Court operates but also gives us a new way of thinking about the institution. Among his contributions is a decision-making model that is more convincing and persuasive than the standard model for explaining judicial behavior.

This study examines the agenda setting and decision making behavior of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1888 to 1997. The study finds that economics decisions dominated the Court's docket up until the 1950s, when civil liberties cases became more prominent, and judicial power decisions remained relatively constant.

The U.S. Supreme Court is the quintessential example of a court that expanded its agenda into policy areas that were once reserved for legislatures. Yet scholars know very little about what causes attention to various policy areas to ebb and flow on the Supreme Court’s agenda. Vanessa A. Baird’s Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda represents the first scholarly attempt to connect justices’ priorities, litigants’ strategies, and aggregate policy outputs of the U.S. Supreme Court. Most previous studies on the Supreme Court’s agenda examine case selection, but Baird demonstrates that the agenda-setting process begins long before justices choose which cases they will hear. When justices signal their interest in a particular policy area, litigants respond by sponsoring well-crafted cases in those policy areas. Approximately four to five years later, the Supreme Court’s agenda in those areas expands, with cases that are comparatively more politically important and divisive than other cases the Court hears. From issues of discrimination and free expression to welfare policy, from immigration to economic regulation, strategic supporters of litigation pay attention to the goals of Supreme Court justices and bring cases they can use to achieve those goals. Since policy making in courts is iterative, multiple well-crafted cases are needed for courts to make comprehensive policy. Baird argues that judicial policy-making power depends on the actions of policy entrepreneurs or other litigants who systematically respond to the priorities and preferences of Supreme Court justices.

Much research is devoted to the decision-making power and precedent set by the Supreme Court. Less attention, however, is given to the strategic behavior during case selection. This book argues that case selection is done strategically, and by means of various criteria - influencing its constitutional position and importance.

Since the early twentieth century, the Rule of Four has required the assent of at least four justices for a certiorari petition to receive full review by the Supreme Court. This rule changed during the 1970s, when justices began to cast "Join-3" votes. Despite the significance of these votes, scholars have simply treated them as votes to Grant review. We analyze the conditions under which justices cast Join-3 votes and determine whether it is appropriate to treat them as Grant votes. Our results show that collegiality and uncertainty drive the decision to cast Join-3 votes and that it is inappropriate to pool Join-3 and Grant votes together. We discuss alternative coding practices for agenda-setting scholars.

The attention given to a specific issue area by a political institution drives the types of policies adopted by the institution. For this reason, scholars study agenda-setting and its impacts within institutions to shape issue attention. Yet much of the research on judicial agenda-setting has focused on individual behavior within the confines of the U.S. Supreme Court. This excludes the possibility of accounting for how institutional structure shapes a court's agenda as the Court's formal procedures have not changed significantly in the past 80 years. This previous research suggests that institutions themselves do not have an effect on a court's issue agenda or the types of cases it hears. On the other hand institutional differences might interact with the individual motivations of judges and litigants to influence the composition of a court's docket, but scholars have not identified these effects due to the continued focus on the U.S. Supreme Court.In this project, I develop a theory of institutional judicial agenda-setting which accounts for the motivations of justices, litigants, and interest groups, the parties which have the most influence on a court's agenda, and how institutional rules effect agenda-setting at both the macro- (e.g. a court's overall policy agenda) and micro- (e.g. whether or not an individual case is heard) levels. More specifically, the project leverages cross-state variation in state courts of last resort (COLRs) to empirically test hypotheses about how two broad aspects of COLRs -- jurisdictional rules/procedures and processes for selection and retention of justices -- interact to shape the courts' agendas. In doing so, I develop a generalized model of agenda-setting applicable to any court of last resort. I apply this framework and use new data sources to evaluate how state COLRs shape their agendas. I find that that macro-policy attention is not easily explained by institutional and strategic factors; that judges engage in sincere, not sophisticated, agenda-setting; and that campaign contributions to a state COLR justice from parties involved in litigation increases judicial access.This project offers an integrated, generalized theory of how both justices and litigants shape the judicial agenda, and is the first broad, systematic examination of agenda-setting in state courts of last resort. In the former case, the research identifies to what degree ideological and retention concerns factor into the policy attention of courts and justices' decisions to hear appellate cases, while assessing how litigants balance their desire for judicial victory with their resources and knowledge about the probability of success when facing a hostile court. In the latter case, the research examines the processes of important appellate courts and seeks to resolve the dispute over whether or not these courts are important policymaking institutions. Understanding how justices and litigants influence the agenda-setting process has implications for the strategies of these groups when deciding whether or not to appeal cases or voting to grant or deny appellate review.