Supreme Court Decision Making: New Institutionalist Approaches. Edited by Cornell W. Clayton and Howard Gillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 344p. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Abstract

The editors of this timely volume announce at the outset that their aim is to provide a forum for recent scholarship that reacts critically to the previous generation of behavioralists who, since the 1950s, have analyzed the U.S. Supreme Court as little more than an aggregate of the relatively stable and identifiable policy preferences held by individual justices. Specifically, these essays pose a collective "response by a succeeding generation of Supreme Court scholars who are trained in political behavioralism but who have rediscovered the value and importance of understanding institutional contexts" (p. 12).