Turn Back the Pages

Here are the covers of my three books. From time to time, I will add papers and research in progress.
 
 

Agenda Book

This is my first book (published in 1991). It is based on my dissertation, but goes significantly further. In this book, I trace the agenda of the United States Supreme Court in the 1933-1988 period. I concentrate on the differences between the Court's volitional and exigent agendas and how the Court clears agenda space to deal with new issues. I focus on the decline of economic issues and how and why that was accomplished. The central focus is on the exapnsion of agenda space for regulation and civil liberties and civil rights cases. I examine the process by which the Court spread its focus across different areas of civil liberties and civil rights and then within the specific areas that made up these broader issue domains. I have updated the analysis for a chapter in Contemplating Courts, edited by Lee Epstein.
 
 

Least Dangerous Branch

Recipient of a 2002 Choice Outstanding Titles Award

In this book (published 2002), I look at the various roles the Supreme Court plays in American politics. I start with an historical examination of the role of the Court and then focus on expanded notions of judicial activism and restraint. I evaluate the arguments that the Court should be restraintist because it is an undemocratic institution, because of its institutional limitations, and because the courts lack the capacity to make policy. I look at the arguments for judicial restraint in a relative manner. The book starts with a discussion of the Bush v. Gore decision that unfolded as I was finishing the manuscript.
 
 

SG Book

This book deals with the Office of the Solicitor General and its role in civil rights, gender discrimination, and reproductive rights. I start with the idea that the Solicitor General is subject to many competing pressures and is constrained by the ability to fulfill obligations to the government, the president, Congress, the Attorney General, the relevant agency, the staff attorneys in the OSG, and the Supreme Court. I examined all the cases in each of the three issue areas beginning with the civil rights cases during the Truman Administration. I interviewed a number of the important participants in the process including all of the living former Solicitors General, including Archibald Cox, Robert Bork, Charles Fried, Kenneth Starr, Drew Days, Walter Dellinger, and Seth Waxman. I examine civil rights in three eras, the Litigation Phase (1945-1963), the Administrative Era (1964-1980 following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), and the Redefinition Phase (1980-2000). I examine how the changes in the law helped influence changes in the Office of the Solicitor General and vice versa. I focus on changes in the types of people chosen to be Solicitor General. The gender policy was an attempt to recreate the race paradigm in a very different era. Reproductive rights was an issue that Solicitors General sought to avoid for a decade and then embraced in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. 
 
 

Current Research

Attached is a paper from a project that Professor Bryan Marshall and I am working on concerning institutional decision making by the Supreme Court. It is still in its early stages. The paper attempts to create an integrative model of Supreme Court decision making and apply it to different political contexts that the Court faces.

Presentation of recent paper
 
 





goin' home