Forrest Maltzman

George Washington University | GW · Department of Political Science

Over the past sixty years, the size of the Supreme Court's docket has varied tremendously, growing at some points in time and shrinking at others. What accounts for this variation in the size of the docket? We focus on two key strategic factors—the predictability of outcomes within the Court and whether justices consider the potential actions of ot...

Legislative enactment is only one step in the life of a law. How a law shapes public life after enactment is frequently the result of whether the judiciary interprets the provisions contained in a law and how courts reconcile provisions within and across laws. But the factors that determine whether the judiciary ends up playing such a role are not...

In this article, we use a multimethod approach to shed light on the strategic use of presidential pets. We draw on primary source materials to demonstrate that pets are an important power center in the White House. Then we turn to presidents' strategic use of their pets in public. We present a theoretical framework and statistical evidence to explo...

Although the review of agency regulations by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been a fundamental aspect of the rulemaking process for three decades, there is little empirical evidence regarding the operation and effects of regulatory review. In this research, we examine a longstanding expectation regarding the...

This chapter articulates the challenges that any empirically oriented scholar would have in devising a measure of judicial preferences. It shows that it is impossible to make robust across-time comparisons using only Court voting. However, if we incorporate additional data we can create a measure of ideology that meets our needs and has face validi...

This concluding chapter first summarizes the book's key themes. These are that justices are influenced by more than just the policy preferences emphasized by the attitudinal model; the law matters for justices; and the influence of specific legal doctrines varies across justices. These findings have important implications for understanding the poli...

Justices have considerable latitude to pursue either their personal preferences or their personal visions of the law. The danger is that the Court gets so far out of line from the rest of the political system that we see fundamental institutional showdowns that threaten the independence of the judiciary, such as the Court-packing controversy in the...

This chapter provides general answers to questions about executive influence on the Court, which will help us to understand decision-making on the Court—what matters and when. It considers whether the Court is beyond democratic control. If the solicitor general's briefs influence justices, this could provide at least some measure of democratically...

How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? This book combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. The book shows how two types...

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for disentangling the political and legal perspectives on Court behavior. It shows that, indeed, the problem is knotty and how it is impossible to fully separate legal from policy-motivated behavior using only Supreme Court voting data. The knottiness of the problem is exacerbated by the fact that legal...

This chapter discusses how historical context and personal experiences influence the legal values of justices, but the connections are imperfect and unpredictable. It argues that legal values are not independent of politics. As legal regimes evolve, so too do the patterns of legal values that justices hold. Adhering to these legal values may lead j...

Building on the theoretical model of Chapter 3, this chapter seeks to assess whether “law” affects judicial decisions independently of policy preferences. Numerous legal doctrines may shape judicial decision-making, including stare decisis, originalism, plain meaning, the promotion of democratic participation, and doctrines with regard to specific...

How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors?The Constrained Courtcombines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. Michael Bailey and...

Students of Congress highlight the connections that legislators cultivate with constituents, bonds that help to secure voters’ trust and incumbents’ reelection. We revisit the forces that shape citizens’ evaluations of their senators, embedding a survey experiment in the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to test for the impact of party...

Because of senatorial courtesy, scholars typically assume that presidents defer to home state senators from their party when selecting judges for the federal courts. We challenge this view, arguing that presidents face structural incentives that encourage them to consult broadly with senators across the partisan and ideological spectrums in choosin...

The relationship between Congress and the judiciary is a complex one that is poorly defined or understood. This ambiguity in the relationship is the result of the failure of the Constitution to define what legal doctrines must shape judicial decision-making or whether the judiciary has the authority to strike the acts of Congress. Whereas the relat...

On September 27, 2007, Lee Sigelman sent an e-mail message to a large number of coauthors, friends, and colleagues. The message began: “Friends: I'm sorry to burden you with the news that follows …” What followed was Lee's report that earlier in the day, he had received a diagnosis of stage IV colon cancer, that it had spread beyond the colon, and...

In previous work, we proposed (Hammond, Bonneau, and Sheehan 2005) and tested (Bonneau, Hammond, Maltzman, and Wahlbeck 2007) a formal model of decision-making by the United States Supreme Court. A key assumption of this model was that for every legal case there exists a “current legal status quo” which is a key point of reference for the justices...

The salience of judicial appointments in contemporary American politics has precipitated a surge of scholarly interest in the dynamics of advice and consent in the U.S. Senate. In this article, we compare alternative pivotal politics models of the judicial nominations process, each capturing a different set of potential veto players in the Senate....

To understand and assess the impact that the law has on judicial decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court, one must disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences. In this paper, we elaborate the fundamental character of this challenge, and then present a novel approach to measuring the effect - if any - of the law on justices' decisions. K...

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislativ...

Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion-writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the...

Do legal factors or policy preferences account for judicial decisions making? This is one of the most important questions faced by students of the Supreme Court. Assessing whether justices' behavior is best explained by their policy preferences or by the law has been hindered by the difficulty of disentangling these two factors. In this paper, we u...

I develop a formal model of bureaucratic policymaking in which a legislature delegates authority to a bureaucratic agency that is subject to ex post review by an executive with diverse preferences. Equilibrium results identify conditions under which executive clearance of agency rulemaking can be pareto optimal for both branches of government, in c...

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed - strengthened or weakened - soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legisl...

On April 19, 2005, after just four rounds of voting, the College of Cardinals announced that 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been selected as the new pope. This announcement startled many. To be sure, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly a quarter of a century Ratzinger had helped select the vast majorit...

In the paper, we explore the extent to which Supreme Court justices are constrained by legislative and executive preferences. We hypothesize and demonstrate that justices' compliance with executive and legislative preferences depends upon preference alignment between the branches, institutional structures that limit congressional action, and the sa...

Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, w...

Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically p...

Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically p...

The chief justice’s power to assign the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court provides an indispensable agenda-setting tool for the chief. Scholars disagree, however, on what factors guide the chief’s use of his assignment powers. Some suggest that the chief assigns cases with an eye to securing his ideological goals, while others contend that...

Overruled?: Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court–Congress Relations. By Jeb Barnes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 219p. $50.00. Students of the interaction between the judicial and elected branches of government typically assume that each branch can understand the other's intentions and capabilities. In classic sepa...

The chief justice’s power to assign the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court provides an indispensable agenda-setting tool for the chief. Scholars disagree, however, on what factors guide the chief’s use of his assignment powers. Some suggest that the chief assigns cases with an eye to securing his ideological goals, while others contend that...

More than a century has passed since the fictional Mr. Dooley declared in his rich Irish brogue that “The Soopreme Court follows the illiction returns,” but until now no hard evidence has existed of just how fixated the Court is on presidential elections [but see Flemming and Wood 1997; Mishler and Sheehan 1993]. Fortunately, now we have proof posi...

Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either-or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate use...

Recent research has uncovered a majority party advantage in the allocation of federal resources, a relationship seemingly at odds with the bipartisan support often enjoyed by distributive policies and programs. We reconcile this disjuncture by developing a partisan blame avoidance account of the distribution of legislative pork. According to this a...

Political observers have remarked on a staggering increase in the length of time it takes for the Senate to confirm presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947 and 1998 and explain the variation o...

We explore Speaker Joseph G. Cannon's exercise of his committee assignment power, using recently discovered notebooks maintained by Speaker Cannon that detail members' committee requests and the lobbying that accompanied these requests. We show that Cannon's assignment power was predictably constrained in many ways in both the 58th and 61st Congres...

Conventional wisdom suggests that Presidents use executive orders, sometimes characterized as presidential legislation, when legislation is too difficult to pass (in the face of an opposition Congress, for example) or when executive departments or agencies tend to embrace their congressional patrons, rather than the White House. According to this m...

Why do justices author or join separate opinions? Most attempts to address the dynamics of con currence and dissent focus on aggregate patterns across time or courts. In contrast, we explain why an individual justice chooses to author or join a separate opinion. We argue that separate opinions result from justices' pursuit of their policy preferenc...

Some recent scholarship affords political parties little role in explaining patterns of legislative outcomes. Policy preferences, rather than partisanship, are said to provide the superior account of legislative behavior. In this paper, we challenge one recent such account of legislative outcomes. We show that the likelihood of finding a party effe...

Supreme Court opinions contain legal rules with broad policy ramifications, and justices try to shape the substance of the Court's opinions. Despite this expectation, scholars have neither systematically measured nor explained the extent to which justices attempt to affect majority opinions. We articulate and test a model that explains how justices...

Prior analyses of the bases of legislators' popular support have provided a mixed set of findings. In this note, we lay out a series of hypotheses about the determinants of legislators' home-state reputations, and test these expectations using a 1996 survey in which 40 thousand constituents in all 50 states rated their senators' job performance. We...

Within the U.S. House of Representatives, standing committee recommendations are usually accepted by the full chamber. Although considerable attention has been paid to the extent that committee recommendations are ratified by the full chamber, relatively little research has addressed the sources of committee success. Committees usually win on the f...

Theory: Supreme Court opinion authors make strategic calculations about the need to craft opinions that are acceptable to their colleagues on the bench. Hypotheses: The willingness of justices to accommodate their colleagues depends upon the size and ideological makeup of the majority conference coalition and the number of suggestions and threats i...

Charlie Wilson (D-TX) described his decision to retire from the U.S. House of Representatives as the best of the three options open to him: “To get defeated, to get carried out feet first, or to … start another life” (Gerhart and Groer 1995). Although much research has been undertaken on electoral defeat (Collie 1981; Ferejohn 1977; Jacobson 1992;...

Justices are strategic actors. This is particularly evident when they change their votes between the original conference on the merits and the Court's announcement of the final decision. We predict that such voting fluidity may be influenced by strategic policy considerations, justices' uncertainty over issues involved in a case, the chief justice'...

One-and five-minute morning speeches and special orders at the end of the day provide members of the House of Representative the opportunity to express themselves to a national audience. We hypothesize that these opportunities for unconstrained floor time can be used either to further a member's electoral prospects or to shape the policy debate. Us...

Judicial scholars are making increased use of data from the justices' personal papers. In the face of comments by justices questioning the reliability of this information and, perhaps, skepticism among judicial scholars about the reliability of some justices' records, it is important to explore the reliability of data drawn from their papers. To do...

Theory: Majority opinion assignments made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can be accounted for with both organizational and attitudinal models of behavior. Hypotheses: The likelihood that the Chief assigns an opinion to a justice depends upon the importance of each case, the size of the initial majority coalition, the timing of the decisi...

A conditional model of committee behavior is proposed to explain variation in committee responsiveness to chamber and party principals. Committee member behavior is consistent with the preferences of both the floor and the party caucuses; variation in salience explains differences in committee responsiveness to noncommittee colleagues. Committee-sp...

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