Feminist Friends of the Court: Amicus Curiae, Social Movement Institutional Activism, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Women’s Rights Cases

ABSTRACT To influence outcomes in U.S. women’s rights Supreme Court cases, feminist advocacy groups and their allies routinely file amicus curiae briefs, third-party briefs designed to persuade the justices in their decision-making. Yet no study has systematically examined the impact of these feminist-supporting amici on judicial decision-making. We argue that advocacy groups’ amicus mobilization can be understood as institutional activism, activism utilizing a judicial channel through which advocacy groups can communicate directly with the justices. To discern whether this form of feminist institutional activism shapes judicial law, we examine amicus activity in the women’s rights cases from the mid-1960s until 2016. We utilize a resource mobilization perspective to examine mobilization of amici but offer refinements of the theory by invoking affected-groups and information theories. Our regression analyses show that use of amici can persuade the justices to vote in favor of the feminist litigant. We also investigate whether the influence of feminist amicus activity is moderated by legal circumstances (for instance, whether a justice is conservative or liberal). We find only limited evidence that the potency of this form of institutional resource mobilization is moderated by the legal context.