Courts and Judges

Scores of works have made important contributions to the study of courts and judges but far fewer are sufficiently powerful to alter perspectives about entire areas of study. The articles in this volume do just that. They are, to be sure, a rather diverse set covering four substantive concerns - judicial selection and retention, judicial decision making, constraints on judicial power and the role of courts in democracies - but all have played crucial roles in shaping or changing the way we think about courts and judges.

Contents: Series preface; Introduction. The Selection and Retention of Judges: Senate voting on Supreme Court nominees: a neoinstitutional model, Charles M. Cameron, Albert D. Cover and Jeffrey A. Segal; The politics of Supreme Court nominations: a theory of institutional constraints and choices, Brian J. Moraski and Charles R. Shipan; Constituent influence in State Supreme Courts: conceptual notes and a case study, Melinda Gann Hall. Judicial Decision Making: Divisions of opinion among justices of the US Supreme Court, C. Herman Pritchett; On the mysterious demise of consensual norms in the United States Supreme Court, Thomas G. Walker, Lee Epstein and William J. Dixon; The study of judicial decision-making as an aspect of political behavior, Glendon A. Schubert; Sophisticated voting and gate-keeping in the Supreme Court, Gregory A. Caldiera, John R. Wright and Christopher J.W. Zorn; Predicting Supreme Court cases probabilistically: the search and seizure cases, Jeffrey A. Segal; Voting behavior in the United States Courts of Appeals 1961-64, Sheldon Goldman; Judicial policy-making and southern school segregation, Michael W. Giles and Thomas G.Walker,; Civic virtue and the feminine voice in constitutional adjudication, Suzanna Sherry; What do judges and justices maximize? (the same thing everybody else does), Richard A. Posner; Strategic policy considerations and voting fluidity on the Burger Court, Forrest Maltzman and Paul J, Wahlbeck. Constraints on Judicial Power: Lower court checks on Supreme Court power, Walter F. Murphy; Judicial partisanship and obedience to legal doctrine: whistleblowing on the Federal Courts of Appeals, Frank B. Cross and Emerson H. Tiller; Overriding Supreme Court statutory interpretation decisions, William N. Eskridge Jr; The logic of strategic defection: court-executive relations in Argentina under dictatorship and democracy, Gretchen Helmke. The Role of Courts in Democracies: Decision-making in a democracy: the supreme court as a na

Lee Epstein is Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law at the Department of Political Science, Washington University, USA.