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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.
Michael McCann, University of Washington
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).
Instead, the volume reveals a rather more complex intellectual dialogue among three distinct approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making that are all vying for prominence today. The leading voices in the collection espouse two quite different versions of the "new institutionalism" that have become broadly recognized throughout the discipline: rational choice institutionalism, also known by its more formal title of "a positive theory of institutions" (PTI), and historical or interpretive institutionalism. The third approach is the attitudinal model, which was inherited from the earlier behavioral era but is still very much alive for its critics and the spirited advocate (Jeffrey Segal) who writes one of the volume's chapters.
The book is organized into three general parts that follow the editors' introductory chapter. Part 1 provides a historical and comparative theoretical grounding. Separate chapters by Cornell Clayton and Howard Gillman make the case for expansive historical interpretive study of institutional norms and forces that shape judicial decision making. A chapter by Forrest Maltzman, James F. Spriggs II, and Paul J. Wahlbeck outlines the alternative rational choice version of new institutionalist analysis. All these chapters are highly interesting because they clearly draw the lines of theoretical division, which enables readers to discern and assess the similarities and differences among the three different approaches in unusually accessible terms. From these accounts, it is apparent that both versions of new...