What influences decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court? For decades social scientists focused on the ideology of individual justices. "Supreme Court Decision Making" moves beyond this focus by exploring how justices are influenced by the distinctive features of courts as institutions and their place in the political system.
Drawing on interpretive-historical institutionalism as well as rational choice theory, a group of leading scholars consider such factors as the influence of jurisprudence, the unique characteristics of supreme courts, the dynamics of coalition building, and the effects...

The dramatic struggle over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election presented judges with an extraordinary political challenge, as well as a historic political temptation. In The Votes That Counted Howard Gillman offers a comprehensive yet critical assessment of how well courts coped with the competing expectations for impartial justice and favorable partisan results.
Lively and authoritative, the book documents how the participants, the press, the academic community, and the public responded during these tension-filled thirty-six days. Gillman also provides a serious yet...

For decades political scientists studying the Court have adopted behavioral approaches and focused on the relatively narrow question of how the justices' policy preferences influence their voting behavior. This emphasis has illuminated important aspects of Supreme Court politics, but it has also left unaddressed many other important questions about this unique and fascinating institution.

Drawing on "the new institutionalism" in the social sciences, the distinguished contributors to this volume attempt to fill this gap by exploring a variety of topics, including the Court's institutional...

"The Constitution Besieged" offers a compelling reinterpretation of one of the most notorious periods in American constitutional history. In the decades following the Civil War, federal and state judges struck down as unconstitutional a great deal of innovative social and economic legislation. Scholars have traditionally viewed this as the work of a conservative judiciary more interested in promoting laissez-faire economics than in interpreting the Constitution. Gillman challenges this scholarly orthodoxy by showing how these judges were in fact observing a long-standing constitutional...

The Complete American Constitutionalism is designed to be the comprehensive treatment and source for debates on the American constitutional experience. It provides the analysis, resources, and materials both domestic and foreign readers must understand with regards to the practice of constitutionalism in the United States. This first volume of a projected eight volume set is entitled: Introduction and The Colonial Era. Here the authors provide the building blocks for constitutional analysis with an in-depth exploration of the constitutional conflicts in the seventeenth and...

This first part to Volume Five of the series covers: The Constitution of the Confederate States. The authors offer a comprehensive analysis of the constitution of the Confederate States during the American Civil War. They provide the various speeches, ordinances and declarations, cases, and a host of other sources accompanied by detailed historical commentary.