Analyzing the Reliability of Supreme Court Justices' Agenda-Setting Records*
Justice System Journal › Vol. 30 Nbr. 3, September 2009
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Summary
Nearly all aspects of the Supreme Court's decision-making process occur outside the public eye. To study how the Court makes law and policy, scholars largely must rely upon archival materials harvested from the private papers of retired Supreme Court justices. Previous efforts to validate the reliability of these materials focus solely on the votes justices cast at the merits stage and were unable to assess the reliability of recently released papers. We examine the agenda-setting records for several justices' papers, including those of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the justice whose papers were most recently made public. Our results suggest that Blackmun's papers are reliable and accurately archive his colleagues' agenda votes.
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Extract
Analyzing the Reliability of Supreme Court Justices' Agenda-Setting Records*
In March 2004, the Library of Congress publicly released the private papers of former Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Consisting of 1,585 boxes of material, the Blackmun papers contain a treasure trove of data for Court scholars. From the role of oral arguments (Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs, 2006) to the opinion-assignment process (Wahlbeck and Maltzman, 2005), data from the Blackmun papers significantly improve our understanding of the Court.
Perhaps most important, the Blackmun papers offer an unprecedented view of the Supreme Court's agenda-setting decisions. Justice Blackmun maintained copious notes that recorded how every justice voted at the agenda stage (his docket sheets), as well as marked up copies of every memorandum that summarized a certiorari petition or appeal brought before the Court during his twenty-four-year tenure (1970-94). In 2007, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Epstein, Segal, and Spaeth (2007) digitally photographed and made freely available online all of Blackmun's papers throughout his years of service durin...See the full content of this document
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