Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court. By Thomas H. Hammond, Chris W. Bonneau, and Reginald S. Sheehan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 299p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This book will almost certainly be a “must read” in classes on judicial politics and in seminars on American political institutions. The authors intentionally developed a very simple model, and so the book is accessible to, and appropriate for, undergraduates as well as graduate students without much formal-theoretic training. Despite the model's simplicity, the substantive topics that the authors engage with the model make it useful for graduate seminars, if only as a jumping-off point for motivating empirical tests or as a foil for the development of more sophisticated models.