Cover

Contents

Preface

Contributors

Chapter 1 - Studying Law and Courts

Part I - Actors in the Legal System

Chapter 2 - Electing Judges

Chapter 3 - Lobbying for Justice: The Rise of Organized Conflict in the Politics of Federal Judgeships

Chapter 4 - Capital Investments in the U.S. Supreme Court: Winning with Washington Representation

Chapter 5 - The Mysterious Case of Establishment Clause Litigation: How Organized Litigants Foiled Legal Change

Part II - Trial Courts

Chapter 6 - Plea Bargaining and Local Legal Culture

Chapter 7 - Imagined Pasts: Sexualized Violence and the Revision of Truth

Chapter 8 - The Fired Football Coach (Or, How Trial Courts Make Policy)

Part III - Lower Appellate Courts

Chapter 9 - Patterns of Appellate Litigation, 1945-1990

Chapter 10 - Decision Making on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Part IV - The U.S. Supreme Court

Chapter 11 - The Dynamics and Determinants of Agenda Change in the Rehnquist Court

Chapter 12 - By Consent of the Governed: Directions in Constitutional Theory

Chapter 13 - The Attitudinal Model

Chapter 14 - The Role of the Supreme Court in American Society. Playing the Reconstruction Game

Part V - The Impact of Courts

Chapter 15 - Media, Knowledge, and Public Evaluations of the Sunreme Court

Chapter 16 - Do Court Decisions Matter?

Chapter 17 - The Real World of Constitutional Rights: The Supreme Court and the Implementation of the Abortion Decisions

Reference Material

Appendix A: Regression and Pooled Cross-Sectional Time Series

Appendix B: Probit and Logit

Appendix C: Conducting Research on Law and Courts: Sources of Data

References

Table of Cases

Index