Explore the vast range of titles available.

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges' social peers.

This analysis seeks to understand the decline of Supreme Court consensual norms often attributed to the failed leadership of Chief Justice Stone. A new unit of analysis—justice-level dissent and concurrence rates—supports an alternative view of observed increases in dissensual decision making. When these measures are estimated with time-series techniques, results offer evidence of multiple changepoints in this norm of the Court that both lead and lag Stone's elevation. Broader contextual explanations related to the alteration of the Court's discretionary issue agenda and its ideological and demographic composition also contribute to fractures in the once-unanimous voting coalitions.

Experimental research by social and cognitive psychologists has established that cooperative groups solve a wide range of problems better than individuals. Cooperative problem solving groups of scientific researchers, auditors, financial analysts, air crash investigators, and forensic art experts are increasingly important in our complex and interdependent society. This comprehensive textbook--the first of its kind in decades--presents important theories and experimental research about group problem solving. The book focuses on tasks that have demonstrably correct solutions within mathematical, logical, scientific, or verbal systems, including algebra problems, analogies, vocabulary, and logical reasoning problems. The book explores basic concepts in group problem solving, social combination models, group memory, group ability and world knowledge tasks, rule induction problems, letters-to-numbers problems, evidence for positive group-to-individual transfer, and social choice theory. The conclusion proposes ten generalizations that are supported by the theory and research on group problem solving. Group Problem Solvingis an essential resource for decision-making research in social and cognitive psychology, but also extremely relevant to multidisciplinary and multicultural problem-solving teams in organizational behavior, business administration, management, and behavioral economics.

This book-what's it about? Why did I write it? When I hear the words \"interdependent,\" \"globalization,\" \"a shrinking world,\" I think they range between cliches on the one hand and buzzwords on the other-but they aren't quite concrete. I thought it might be helpful to write very concretely about what these words mean in terms of the life of a Supreme Court justice. What have they meant at the Court? When I look back and compare twenty years ago to today, I think we have many more cases where those words concretely make a big difference.

How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality?Building the Judiciaryuncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through the close of the twentieth century. Explaining why and how the federal judiciary became an independent, autonomous, and powerful political institution, Justin Crowe moves away from the notion that the judiciary is exceptional in the scheme of American politics, illustrating instead how it is subject to the same architectonic politics as other political institutions. Arguing that judicial institution-building is fundamentally based on a series of contested questions regarding institutional design and delegation, Crowe develops a theory to explain why political actors seek to build the judiciary and the conditions under which they are successful. He both demonstrates how the motivations of institution-builders ranged from substantive policy to partisan and electoral politics to judicial performance, and details how reform was often provoked by substantial changes in the political universe or transformational entrepreneurship by political leaders. Embedding case studies of landmark institution-building episodes within a contextual understanding of each era under consideration, Crowe presents a historically rich narrative that offers analytically grounded explanations for why judicial institution-building was pursued, how it was accomplished, and what--in the broader scheme of American constitutional democracy--it achieved.

Analyzing strategic aspects of judicial decisionmaking is an important element in understanding how law develops. In this article, we examine sophisticated voting on the U.S. Supreme Court by empirically modeling justices' decisions to pass when it is their turn to vote during conference discussions. We argue that, due to the opinion assignment norm, the chief justice may pass when one of the key conditions necessary for sophisticated voting-certainty about the views held by other justices and the agenda-is lacking. By passing, the chief can view his colleagues' votes in order to determine which vote will allow him to assign the majority opinion and, ultimately, forward his policy preferences. Using data from Justice Lewis F. Powell's conference notes, we show that the chief passes for this purpose, and that doing so is an effective strategy. In addition, we show that the senior associate justice in a case, who has a non-trivial chance of assigning the majority opinion, also passes for strategic reasons. As we expect, the data indicate that the remaining associates seem not to pass for strategic purposes.

In the fall of 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a bill that would have overridden a New Deal-era federal statute forbidding retired Justices from serving by designation on the Supreme Court of the United States. The Leahy bill would have authorized the Court to recall willing retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices. This Article uses the Leahy bill as a springboard for considering a number of important constitutional and policy questions, including whether the possibility of 4—4 splits justifies the substitution of a retired Justice for an active one; whether permitting retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices would violate Article III's requirement that there be \"one supreme Court\"; and whether the ethical limitations on extrajudicial activities should be the same for active and retired judges and Justices. In addition to relying on published material, we draw on information gleaned from our interview with retired Justice Stevens, who was the original source of the Leahy proposal.

Cross and Lindquist analyze the impact of William Rehnquist's role as Chief Justice on the voting patterns of the Court in recent Terms.

The assignment of the Supreme Court's majority opinions is one of the principal prerogatives enjoyed by the Chief Justice. A strategic Chief Justice is able to influence the course of legal policy through agenda setting; that is, the Chief Justice exercises influence over policy by choosing the Justice who will author an opinion, thereby determining which policy alternative will be developed in a majority opinion draft. Through strategic opinion assignment, then, the Chief is able to guide the Court to an outcome that is closest to his preference or that will result in the least policy loss. Despite the importance of this prerogative for agenda setting and the development of the law, the Chief Justice operates within twin constraints: the need for majority support for the proposed opinion and the efficient operation of the Court. In particular, the Chief Justice often assigns opinions to Justices with whom he allies in order to maintain fragile conference majorities. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist also asserted that his assignments were based on the need to complete work on the cases and to maintain an equitable distribution of cases among the Justices. Using data drawn from the papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun and other sources, I test these expectations through an examination of opinion assignment during the Rehnquist Court from October Term 1986 through October Term 1993.