Lee Epstein & Jack Knight , The Choices Justices Make
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چکیده
Epstein and Knight’s The Choices Justices make builds upon and empirically assesses Walter F. Murphy’s argument in Elements of Judicial Strategy (1964) that Supreme Court justices act strategically. “On our account,” Epstein and Knight write, “which we call a strategic account, justices may be primarily seekers of legal policy, but they are not unsophisticated characters who make choices based merely on their own political preferences. Instead, justices are strategic actors who realize that their ability to achieve their goals depends on a consideration of the preferences of others, of the choices they expect others to make, and of the institutional context in which they act” (Epstein and Knight 1998: xiii). Specifically, a Supreme Court justice must make interdependent choices that take account of the preferences of (1) his/her fellow justices, (2) the executive branch or the legislature, (3) the public. The law, by this account, constitutes the slow accretion of myriad bouts of “short-term strategic decision-making” (ibid). As such, Epstein and Knight seek to incorporate the insights of rational choice institutionalism within the study of judicial behavior, and to oppose the attitudinal model that “for nearly thirty years” has misleadingly characterized “justices as unconstrained decision makers who are free to behave in accord with their own ideological attitudes” (ibid: xii).
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The Use and Limits of Martin - Quinn Scores to Assess Supreme Court Justices , with Special Attention to the Problem of Ideological Drift Ward Farnsworth
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تاریخ انتشار 2015