Since 1958 (Schubert, 1958) and particularly since 1989 (Marks, 1989), a host of Supreme Court scholars have advanced various strategic models in an attempt to explain why the Supreme Court justices behave the way they do.

The purpose of this book is to introduce a great deal of the Supreme Court strategic research to undergraduate and graduate students, to evaluate it, and, at times, to present an original perspective regarding the topics covered by it. Strategic scholars, for example, typically view the majority opinion as a product of bargaining among the justices. In Chapter 8 of this book, however, we use the data supplied by Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck for the Burger Court (2000) and show that there was very little individual bargaining over the content of the majority opinion on that Court. In addition, the conventional wisdom is that the individual justices pursue an outcome-prediction strategy; in other words, they vote to grant cert when they expect to win at the final vote on the merits and vote to deny cert when they expect to lose. In Chapter 5, we examine the prior literature, present some new findings, and conclude that there is much less support for this model than many strategic scholars believe.

We have attempted to write a book that can be understood by students who may lack a good methodological background but who are willing to make the effort of following a theoretical argument.