The authors analyze abortion and death penalty decisions by the Supreme Court and argue that they provide prime examples of abrupt legal change. After proposing that the strength of legal arguments has at least as much impact on Court decisions as do public opinion and justices' political beliefs, they focus on the way litigators propel certain issues onto the Court’s agenda and seek to persuade the justices to affect legal change.

This volume convincingly lays to rest two held beliefs that have long impeded scholarly analysis of the role of courts and litigation in American politics: 1) that group resort to the courts is a rather recent phenomenon resulting from actions of the Warren Court and the Civil Rights Movement; and 2) that unique and distinctive features of the judiciary somehow place it beyond or outside analytic frameworks used to study and analyze the role, nature and functioning of other governing insti...

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In litigation judges are confronted with empirical evidence in cases ranging from bankruptcy and taxation to criminal law and environmental in...

The Choices Justices Make is a groundbreaking work that offers a strategic account of Supreme Court decision making. Justices realize that their ability to achieve their policy and other goals depends on the preferences of other actors, the choices they expect others to make, and the institutional context in which they act. All these factors hold sway over justices as they make their decisions, from which cases to accept, to how to interact with their colleagues, and what policies...

In Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice, bestselling authors Lee Epstein, Kevin T. McGuire, and Thomas G. Walker show students how political factors influence judicial decisions and shape the development of constitutional law. The Twelfth Edition, updated with additional material such as recent court rulings, more than 500 supplemental cases, and greater coverage of freedom of expression, will facilitate a deep...

Free speech and academic freedom have long been hot topics on college campuses. Free Speech: A Campus Toolkit equips students with the tools they need to make informed judgments about campus controversies for themselves. Rather than telling them what to think about the question of free speech, prominent scholars and experts Rebecca L. Brown, Lee Epstein, Adam Liptak, and Andrew D. Martin weave theoretical and historical analysis with contemporary examples to help ...

Volume 21 features articles on: the impact of framed information and project importance on capital budgeting decisions; the measurement of participation in budgeting practice and research; the impact of adverse selection and risk propensity on managers' project evaluation decisions; relative hedonic utility and budgetary conflict resolution; management control systems, environmental uncertainty, and organizational slack; industrial relations, budgetary participation and budget use; corpora...

Featured in Volume 22 of Advances in Management Accounting are articles on: The Effect of Personality Traits and Fairness on Honesty in Managerial Reporting; The Impact of Firm Size on the Productivity of Resources; Transfer of Performance Measurement System Innovations Across Economic Sectors; Target Costing and Product and Production Interdependencies; Cost Accounting, Simulation, and Post-Structuralist Understanding; Input-Based Performance Evaluation, Incentive Intensity, and Proactive...

Advances in Management Accounting publishes well-developed articles on a variety of current topics in management accounting that are relevant to researchers in both practice and academe. As one of the premier management accounting research journals, Advances in Management Accounting is well poised to meet the needs of management accounting scholars. Volume 23 of Advances in Management Accounting features articles on: The Sociological Approaches of Organizational Learning and Applications t...

Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes, yet their behavior is not well understood, even among themselves. Using statistical methods, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making to dispel the mystery of how decisions from district courts to the Supreme Court are made.

The past decade has witnessed a worldwide explosion of work aimed at illuminating judicial-behavior: the choices judges make and the consequences of their choices. We focus on strategic accounts of judicial-behavior. As in other approaches to judging, preferences and institutions play a central role but strategic accounts are unique in one important respect: They draw attention to the interdependent - i.e., the strategic - nature of judicial decisions. On strategic accounts, judges do not ...

Seventeen thought-provoking essays in this sophisticated yet accessible reader demonstrate how political scientists conduct research on law, courts, and the judicial process, and at the same time answer interesting, substantive questions. Illustrating the breadth and depth of judicial politics studies, the essays convey to students the array of contemporary thinking -- both theoretical and methodological -- at work in the field.The book′s five parts cover subjects taught in most ju...