- The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics
- The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Judicial Behavior
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Appointing Federal Judges
- Appointing Supreme Court Justices
- Judicial Elections: Judges and their “New-Style” Constituencies
- Federal Judicial Tenure
- Law Clerks
- Gatekeeping and Filtering in Trial Courts
- Access to Intermediate Appellate Courts
- Agenda-Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
- Courtroom Proceedings in U.S. Federal Courts
- Opinion Writing
- Vertical <i>Stare Decisis</i>
- Law in Judicial Decision-Making
- The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior and the Separation of Powers
- Judicial Review
- The Role of Personal Attributes and Social Backgrounds on Judging
- Ideology and Partisanship
- The Economic Analysis of Judicial Behavior
- Judges and their Audiences
- Interest Groups and the Judiciary
- The Relationship between Courts and Legislatures
- Courts and Executives
- Covering the Courts
- The Supreme Court and Public Opinion
- Judicial Impact
- Cognition in the Courts: Analyzing the Use of Experiments to Study Legal Decision-Making
- New Measurement Technologies: A Review and Application to Nuremberg and Justice Jackson
- The Use of Observational Data to Study Law and the Judiciary
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Understanding the conditions under which the Supreme Court sets its agenda is crucial to understanding Supreme Court behavior. After all, before the justices make any decision on the merits of a case, they must first decide whether to hear it at all. This chapter analyzes Supreme Court agenda-setting. It begins by describing the process justices employ to select cases to review. It examines how parties file certiorari petitions, the certiorari pool used to provide guidance to the justices, and the conferences in which justices vote to grant or deny review to cert petitions. The chapter then discusses four explanations political scientists have provided to explain the conditions under which justices set the agenda. The article concludes by examining limitations of existing scholarship and providing suggestions for future scholarship.
Keywords: Supreme Court, agenda-setting, certiorari, law clerks, cue theory, strategic model, limitations
Ryan J. Owens is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
James Sieja is Visiting Assisting Professor of Government at Skidmore College.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics
- The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Judicial Behavior
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Appointing Federal Judges
- Appointing Supreme Court Justices
- Judicial Elections: Judges and their “New-Style” Constituencies
- Federal Judicial Tenure
- Law Clerks
- Gatekeeping and Filtering in Trial Courts
- Access to Intermediate Appellate Courts
- Agenda-Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
- Courtroom Proceedings in U.S. Federal Courts
- Opinion Writing
- Vertical <i>Stare Decisis</i>
- Law in Judicial Decision-Making
- The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior and the Separation of Powers
- Judicial Review
- The Role of Personal Attributes and Social Backgrounds on Judging
- Ideology and Partisanship
- The Economic Analysis of Judicial Behavior
- Judges and their Audiences
- Interest Groups and the Judiciary
- The Relationship between Courts and Legislatures
- Courts and Executives
- Covering the Courts
- The Supreme Court and Public Opinion
- Judicial Impact
- Cognition in the Courts: Analyzing the Use of Experiments to Study Legal Decision-Making
- New Measurement Technologies: A Review and Application to Nuremberg and Justice Jackson
- The Use of Observational Data to Study Law and the Judiciary
- Index
