Jeffrey Segal & Harold Spaeth , The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model
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چکیده
Segal and Spaeth’s The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisisted argues that judges are policymakers who decide cases primarily (and sometimes exclusively) on the basis of their personal policy preferences. This is particularly true of Supreme Court justices, for the American political system leaves them unconstrained when issuing decisions on the merits. Segal and Spaeth label this thesis the attitudinal model. They contrast the attitudinal model with the legal model, which posits that judges are relatively mechanical decision-makers who are fully constrained by pre-existing law, and the rational choice (or strategic) model, which posits that all judges, including Supreme Court judges, are constrained by their institutional environment (and Congressional preferences), and will hence decide cases strategically to avoid being overruled. A series of statistical analyses run on post-WWII Supreme Court case law data are interpreted as establishing the superiority of the attitudinal model, the incompleteness of the legal model, and the irrelevance of the rational choice model.
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