Of Time and Judicial Behavior

United States Supreme Court Agenda-Setting and Decision-Making, 1888–1997

by Drew Noble Lanier

The present study examines the agenda-setting and the decision-making of the U.S. Supreme Court across a period that encompasses several wars, a Great Depression, a president’s attempt to pack the Court, and changes in the Court’s jurisdiction. Accordingly, it paints a broad historical picture of the Court, longer than any previous study of those aspects of its business. It provides a wealth of data on the opinions that the Court issued and what issues the Court found most compelling across more than a century of jurisprudence, adding to its value as a research tool.

The first chapter discusses how the existing literature has studied the Court, and how the current work builds upon the findings of those previous studies. While it certainly has gone through important changes during these years, the Court’s docket and its decision-making were vastly different during the post–1945 era than they were in prior years. For example, prior to 1925, the Court was regularly deciding over three hundred cases per term, while in recent terms the Court has issued approximately only seventy-five formal rulings. The second chapter places the Court in historical perspective. Because many of the current studies of the Court focus on the post–1945 Court, not much is known about earlier members of the Court, save for some famous figures. The third chapter is composed of institutional-level analyses of the composition and dynamics of the Court’s workload and agenda. These descriptive analyses report the total number of decisions, disag-
gregated into twelve issue areas, that the Court issued. In sum, economics decisions dominated the Court’s docket until about 1945, and then civil liberties decisions won the lion’s share of the high court’s rulings. It also demonstrates that the Court took a more active role in the politics of the day by addressing such concerns.

The fourth chapter finds that the rate of unanimous decisions has drastically declined since the late 1930s. More importantly, these dynamics portend a changing role for the Court as the members moved away from implicit understandings that they should not voice their individual opinion in a case. The fifth chapter examines the level of liberalism that the Court has expressed across time. Graphs of these series enable readers to quickly obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the Court’s policy views since 1888. In sum, the Court was not as conservative in economics matters as many scholars may have believed: it decided liberally about fifty percent of the time prior to 1945. However, during this period, the Court was very conservative in civil liberties matters; the Court ruled in the liberal direction in only about twenty-five percent of the cases during the first forty years of the study. The sixth chapter conducts fractional cointegration analyses of the Court’s liberalism and finds that there is a long-run relationship between the justices’ attitudes and the Court’s decisions. However, these measures are more strongly associated with its civil liberties decision-making than its economics rulings, implying that the Court has become more politically oriented recently. Moreover, the Great Depression and World War I are associated with the Court’s decisional processes. Hence, the pre–1945 Court was drastically different from the post–1945 one, suggesting that it has undergone institutional changes that influenced its decision-making and agenda-setting.

 LC 2002155202

ISBN 1-57591-067-5

Printed in the U.S.A.