Key Concepts

This chapter sets the structure for the remainder of the book. The chapter sets out three categories of factors capable of explaining judicial behavior: legal factors, organizational factors, and political factors. The principal legal factors are “opinion below,” or the adjusted proportion of judges who have found for the appellant, and specialization. The main organizational factors are workload and case importance. The political factors are the rates of agreement between Supreme Court judges, and the types of litigants before the court and in particular whether governmental litigants are represented. This same division into legal, organizational, and political factors is used to structure the chapters that follow.