¹ Bickel, Alexander M., The Unpublished Opinions of Mr Justice Brandeis: The Supreme Court at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 1.Google Scholar

² Likens, Thomas, ‘Discretionary Review by the Supreme Court, Part 1: The Model’ (unpublished manuscript, Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky, 1978)Google Scholar, ‘Discretionary Review by the Supreme Court, Part II: Analysis of the Model’ (unpublished manuscript, Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky, 1979)Google Scholar, and ‘Agenda-Setting by the High Court: A Dynamic Analysis’ (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1979)Google Scholar; Provine, Doris M., Case Selection in the United States Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and, on a state supreme court, see Baum, Lawrence, ‘Policy Goals in Judicial Gatekeeping: A Proximity Model of Discretionary Jurisdiction’, American Journal of Political Science, XXI (1977), 13–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Judicial Demand-Screening and Decisions on the Merits: A Second Look’, American Politics Quarterly, VII (1979), 106–19.Google Scholar

³ Tanenhaus, Joseph, Schick, Marvin, Muraskin, Matthew, and Rosen, Daniel, ‘The Supreme Court's Certiorari Jurisdiction: Cue Theory’, in Schubert, Glendon, ed., Judicial Decision-Making (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 111–32.Google Scholar

⁴ Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘The Decision on Certiorari as an Indicator to Decision “On the Merits”’, Polity, IV (1972), 429–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ulmer, S. Sidney, Hintze, William, and Kirklosky, Louise, ‘The Decision to Grant Certiorari: Further Considerations on Cue Theory’, Law and Society Review, VI (1972), 637–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘Selecting Cases for Supreme Court Review: An Underdog Model’, American Political Science Review, LXXII (1978), 902–10, p. 902.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ See, for instances, Caldeira, Gregory A. and McCrone, Donald J., ‘Of Time and Judicial Activism: A Study of the United States Supreme Court, 1800–1973’Google Scholar, in Halpern, Stephen and Lamb, Charles, eds., Supreme Court Activism and Restraint (forthcoming, 1981)Google Scholar; Likens, , ‘Agenda-Setting by the High Court: A Dynamic Analysis’Google Scholar; and Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘Dimensionality and Change in Judicial Behavior’, in Herndon, James F. and Bernd, Joseph, eds., Mathematical Applications in Political Science (Charlottesville, Virginia: Thomas Jefferson Center, 1973), pp. 40–67.Google Scholar

⁷ For such studies of lower courts, see Cook, Beverly Blair, ‘Public Opinion and Federal Judicial Policy’, American Journal of Political Science, XXI (1977), 567–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Judicial Policy: Change Over Time’, American Journal of Political Science, XXIII (1979), 208–14Google Scholar; and Kritzer, Herbert, ‘Political Correlates of the Behavior of Federal District Judges: A “Best Case” Analysis’, Journal of Politics, XXXXI (1978), 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Federal Judges and Their Political Environments’, American Journal of Political Science, XXIII (1979), 194–207.Google Scholar

⁸ See, for examples, Wildavsky, Aaron B., The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964)Google Scholar; and Shapiro, Martin, ‘Stability and Change in Judicial Decision-Making: Incrementalism or Stare Decisis?’ Law in Transition Quarterly, XII (1965), 134–57.Google Scholar

⁹ Schattschneider, E. E., The Semi-Sovereign People (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1960), p. 3Google Scholar. See also, of course, Truman, David B., The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951)Google Scholar, for the notion of ‘gatekeeping’ and ‘access’; more specifically, for the courts, see pp. 479–500.

¹⁰ For studies of agenda setting, see, among others, Cobb, Roger W. and Elder, Charles D., Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Downs, Anthony, ‘Up and Down with Ecology-the “Issue-Attention Cycle”’, The Public Interest, XXXII (1973), 38–50Google Scholar; Walker, Jack L., ‘Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection’, British Journal of Political Science, VII (1977), 423–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crenson, Matthew A., The Un-Politics of Pollution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).Google Scholar

¹¹ See Gerhard Casper and Posner, Richard N., The Workload of the Supreme Court (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1976)Google Scholar; Casper, and Posner, , ‘The Caseload of the Supreme Court: 1975 and 1976 Terms’, in Kurland, Phillip B. and Casper, Gerhard, eds., The 1977 Supreme Court Review (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 87–98Google Scholar; Casper, and Posner, , ‘A Study of the Supreme Court's Caseload’, Journal of Legal Studies, III (1974), 339–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bickel, Alexander M., The Caseload of the Supreme Court – and What, if Anything, to Do about It (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1973)Google Scholar; and Federal Judicial Center, Report of the Study Group on the Caseload of the Supreme Court (Washington: Federal Judicial Center, 1972).Google Scholar

¹² Cowart, Andrew T., ‘Expanding Formal Models of Budgeting to Include Environmental Effects’, Policy and Politics, IV (1975), 53–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Caldeira, Gregory A. and Cowart, Andrew T., ‘Budgets, Institutions, and Change: Criminal Justice Policy in America’, American Journal of Political Science, xxiv (1980), 413–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Boynton, G. R. and Kwon, Wook, ‘Social Change and Political Issues: The Dynamics of Political Attention’ (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1978)Google Scholar; and Cowart, , “The Economic Policies of European Governments, Part I: Monetary Policy’, British Journal of Political Science, VIII (1978), 255–311Google Scholar, and ‘The Economic Policies of European Governments, Part II: Fiscal Policy’, British Journal of Political Science, VIII (1978), 425–39.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See the discussions in Dahl, Robert A., ‘Decision Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy Maker’, Journal of Public Law, vi (1957), 279–95Google Scholar; and Funston, Richard Y., ‘The Supreme Court and Critical Elections’, American Political Science Review, LXIX (1975), 795–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That the Supreme Court should be responsive to the public is, as I understand it, the upshot of Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘Researching the Supreme Court in a Democratic Society: Some Thoughts on New Directions’, Law and Policy Review, 1 (1979), 53–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Arthur S. and Sastri, D. S., ‘Secrecy in the Supreme Court: On the Need for Piercing the Red Velour Curtain’, Buffalo Law Review, xxii (1973), 799–823.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Pindyck, Robert S. and Rubinfeld, Daniel L., Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 421–751.Google Scholar

¹⁶ One should, of course, remember that full opinions are but one of a number of stages in the agenda-building process in the Court. ‘In agenda-setting terms’, one scholar remarks ‘The Court deals with not one but three distinct agendas. At one level it is confronted by its Jurisdictional Agenda. This agenda is not composed by the Court. It consists of applications for review of lower court decisions forwarded by losing litigants below and contains four to five thousand cases per term. The action taken on these agenda items determines, inter alia, the Plenary Case Agenda, i.e., the Court selects from its Jurisdictional Agenda the cases to be decided after plenary treatment. These cases make up the Plenary Case Agenda. In the process of a warding jurisdiction and deciding plenary cases, the Court develops its Issue-Action Agenda. This last agenda consists of the issues the Court will confront and decide authoritatively.’ (See Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘Issue Fluidity in the U.S. Supreme Court: An Exploration in Agenda-Building’ (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 5.)Google Scholar

¹⁷ See Skogan, Wesley, ‘The Validity of Official Crime Statistics: An Empirical Investigation’, Social Science Quarterly, LV (1974), 25–38Google Scholar; and Skogan, Wesley, ‘Measurement Problems in Official and Survey Crime Rates’, Journal of Criminal Justice, III (1975), 17–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Gallup, George, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972)Google Scholar and Gallup, George, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1972–1977 (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1978).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Now it might have been preferable to use data on public responses to closed-ended questions, because then one could be certain that ‘public concern’ was autonomous, rather than the product perhaps of elite domination of the mass media. Unfortunately, however, relevant closed-ended data that are available derive from so diverse a set of queries and irregular times as to render them useless for present purposes.

²⁰ Casper, and Posner, , The Workload of the Supreme Court, p. 36.Google Scholar

²¹ Casper, and Posner, , The Workload of The Supreme Court, p. 3Google Scholar; and Casper, and Posner, , ‘The Caseload of the Supreme Court: 1975 and 1976 Terms’, p. 92.Google Scholar

²² See Schubert, Glendon, The Judicial Mind Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Rohde, David W. and Spaeth, Harold J., Supreme Court Decision Making (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976)Google Scholar. On the basis of extensive statistical analysis, these authors have labelled the jurists on the Court from 1935 through 1976 on a left-right continuum. To create the present variable I have used these sources, together with my own judgements about judicial ideologies during this period.

²³ Thus use of regression in both time-series and cross-sectional studies assumes that ‘errors corresponding to different observations are uncorrelated… When the error terms from different observations are correlated, we say that the error process is serially correlated or autocorrelated’. Normally, ‘the presence of serial correlation will not affect the unbiasedness or consistency of the ordinary least-squares regression estimators, but it does affect their efficiency’. The tendency, then, is to reject the null hypothesis when it should not be rejected. See Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts, pp. 18, 107.Google Scholar

²⁴ Hildreth, G. and Lu, J. Y., ‘Demand Relations with Autocorrelated Disturbances’ (East Lansing: Technical Bulletin 276, Agricultural Experiment Station, Michigan State University, 1960).Google Scholar

²⁵ The Durbin-Watson statistic runs from zero through four; a value near two indicates the lack of first-order autocorrelation. Where successive errors are quite similar to each other, the Durbin-Watson will be low, suggesting positive autocorrelation. Where successive errors are quite opposite, the Durbin-Watson will be high, indicating negative autocorrelation. See Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts, pp. 113–16Google Scholar; see also Ostrom, Charles W. Jr., Time Series Analysis Regression Techniques (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978), pp. 32–5Google Scholar, for a straightforward and accessible treatment of the topic.

²⁶ See generally, Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Models and Economic ForecastsGoogle Scholar: and Kmenta, Jan, Elements of Econometrics (New York: Macmillan, 1971).Google Scholar

²⁷ Caldeira, and Cowart, , ‘Budgets, Institutions, and Change: Criminal Justice Policy in America’.Google Scholar

²⁸ See, for example, Adamany, David W., ‘Legitimacy, Realigning Elections, and the Supreme Court’, Wisconsin Law Review (1973), 790–846.Google Scholar

²⁹ I have estimated this equation for a number of categories of criminal filings – state, federal, state paid, state indigent, federal paid, and federal indigent – and the results support those reported in the text.

³⁰ For evidence that budgets for criminal justice in the United States respond quite markedly to increases in media coverage of crime, see Caldeira, and Cowart, , ‘Policies, Change, and Responsiveness: Alternative Models of Budgeting’ (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Madison, Wisconsin, 1980).Google Scholar

³¹ Cook, , ‘Public Opinion and Federal Judicial Policy’Google Scholar; Cook, , ‘Judicial Policy: Change Over Time’Google Scholar; Kritzer, , ‘Political Correlates of the Behavior of Federal District Judges: A “Best Case” Analysis’Google Scholar; Gibson, James L., ‘Environmental Constraints on the Behavior of Judges: A Representational Model of Judicial Decision Making’, Law and Society Review, XIV (1980), 343–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kuklinski, James and Stanga, John E., ‘Political Participation and Governmental Responsiveness: The Behavior of California Superior Courts’, American Political Science Review, LXXIII (1979), 1090–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 223 (1882).Google Scholar

³³ Falbo v. United Slates, 320 U.S. 549, 556 (1944).Google Scholar

³⁴ Hodder-Williams, Richard, ‘Is There a Burger Court?’ British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979) 173–200. pp. 192–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, does a good job of describing the broad conception Mr Burger has of the role of the Chief Justice of the United States.

³⁵ Cf. Hart, Henry, ‘Foreword: The Time Chart of the Justices’, Harvard Law Review, LXXIII (1959). 74–125Google Scholar; and Arnold, Thurman, ‘Professor Hart's Theology’, Harvard Law Review, LXXIII (1960), 1298–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ See Caldeira, and Cowart, , ‘Budgets, Institutions, and Change: Criminal Justice Policy in America’, pp. 427–8, 432–5.Google Scholar

³⁷ Dahl, , ‘Decision Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy Maker’Google Scholar; and Adamany, , ‘Legitimacy, Realigning Elections, and the Supreme Court’.Google Scholar

³⁸ Decisions ‘on the merits’ include cases in which the Court meets the issues stated in the petitions head on, rather than using a procedural technique to dispose of the case.

³⁹ See, for example, Schubert, , The Judicial Mind Revisited.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Ulmer, , ‘The Decision on Certiorari as an Indicator to Decision “on the Merits”’Google Scholar; and Ulmer, , ‘Supreme Court Justices as Strict and Not-So-Strict Constructionists: Some Implications’, Law and Society Review, VIII (1974), 13–34.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ulmer, , ‘Dimensionality and Change in Judicial Behavior’Google Scholar; and Ulmer, , ‘Voting Blocs and “Access” to the Supreme Court: 1947–1956 Terms’, Jurimetrics Journal, XVI (1976), 6–13.Google Scholar

⁴² McCrone, Donald J., ‘Identifying Voting Strategies from Roll-Call Votes: A Method and an Application’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, II (1977), 177–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ These scholars include, among others, Mason, Alpheus T., Harlan Fiske Stone, Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Murphy, Walter F., Elements of Judicial Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Danelski, David J., ‘The Influence of the Chief Justice in the Decisional Process’, in Murphy, Walter F. and Pritchett, C. Herman, eds., Courts, Judges, and Politics (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 497–508.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Likens, , ‘Discretionary Review by the Supreme Court, Part I: The Model’.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Kagan, Robert A., Cartwright, Bliss, Friedman, Lawrence M. and Wheeler, Stanton, ‘The Business of State Supreme Courts’, Stanford Law Review, XXX (1977), 121–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ The fitted data in Figure 1 do not form the usual, straight line. This peculiarity arises from the correction for autocorrelation employed here. See Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Model and Economic Forecasts, pp. 108–13Google Scholar, for an excellent explanation.

⁴⁷ See Walker, , ‘Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection’Google Scholar; Burstein, Paul and Freudenberg, William, ‘Changing Public Policy: The Impact of War Costs, Public Opinion, and Anti-War Demonstrations on Vietnam War Motions’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXIV (1978), 99–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burstein, and Freudenberg, , ‘Ending the Vietnam War: Components of Change in Senate Voting on Vietnam War Bills’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXII (1977), 991–1006CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The latter two studies do not focus explicitly on the agenda, but, instead, examine large shifts in voting, shifts that result in fundamental changes in public policy.

⁴⁸ For the effect of ‘succession’ on policy and agenda, see Bunce, Valerie Jane, ‘The Succession Connection: Policy Cycles and Political Change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’, American Political Science Review, LXXIV (1980), 966–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Hibbs, Douglas, ‘Political Parties and Macro-economic Policy’, American Political Science Review, LXXI (1977), 467–87.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Pennock, J. Roland, ‘Reponsiveness, Responsibility, and Majority Rule’, American Political Science Review, XLVI (1953), 790–810, p. 791.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Adamany, , ‘Legitimacy, Realigning Elections, and the Supreme Court’, passim.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Surveys of the American public have consistently shown that support for civil liberties or democratic principles rests on very shaky foundations; see, for instances, Stouffer, Samuel A., Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York: Wiley, 1955)Google Scholar; Davis, James A., ‘Communism, Conformity, Cohorts, and Categories: American Tolerance in 1954 and 1972–73’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXI (1975), 491–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more recently, Sullivan, John L., Marcus, George E., Feldman, Stanley and Piereson, James E., ‘The Sources of Political Tolerance: A Multivariate Analysis’, American Political Science Review, LXXV (1981), 92–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar