Book Review: The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court

• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806295607
• Author: Michael Israel
• Date: 01 December 2006
• Published date: 01 December 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

questions concerning whose definition of reality prevails and why. This book was basically

atheoretical and did not address these issues and concerns. Why not? I was expecting an

extensive critique of Court TV and other televised court trials, which would be a much

more interesting read to me.

As a teacher and a scholar, I would have much preferred a more in-depth, critical analysis

of the issues surrounding “to televise or not to televise inside the courtroom,” but as a brief

“reference source,” Crime and Justice in the Age of Court TV accomplishes its simple goal.

Susan R. Takata

University of Wisconsin–Parkside

Hansford, T. G., & Spriggs II, J. F. (2006). The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme

Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806295607

This work is an interesting and innovative attempt to understand the development of legal

doctrines with social scientific methods. The authors are political scientists who bring their

methodology to a set of doctrines usually reserved for legal thinkers interested in the

dynamic reasoning of court cases, not their outcomes as though they were pieces of objec-

tive law. Hansford and Spriggs are indeed interested in outcomes, specifically Supreme

Court outcomes. They do not look at the doctrinal development of legal principles in cases

but to cases as precedents, which are data, and they have amassed a great deal of data. They

have examined a database of 6,363 Supreme Court precedents from more than 53 years, end-

ing in 1999. Many readers may find it ironic, others innovative, still others heretical, to be

reading about Supreme Court decision making through a database, but that is what they did.

What they wanted to know is the relationship between precedent and court decision mak-

ing. They tested two well-known hypotheses from Supreme Court literature: Justices decide

on the law as best they see it (precedent) or on their own ideology and policy presences (dis-

regarding or bypassing precedent). They find an interactive middle ground that is somewhat

critical of most of the literature that went into their hypotheses. Still, before we can be com-

fortable with this finding, there are some conceptual issues that we first must consider.

For one, readers of this journal may be disappointed that this study does not focus on

criminal justice legal issues, and many of us suspect that there is distinctive criminal justice

jurisprudence. The authors’ database is of every case that went to a full written opinion by

the Court in those 53 years. It would be interesting to know if criminal cases followed prece-

dent or ideology any more or less than the base line, but this study is of generic Supreme

Court decision making. There are some criminal cases used as examples, but they are often

arcane and unknown to at least this court watcher with some knowledge of the major cases.

Would we not like to see some discussion, for example, of the relationship between Mapp v.

Ohio as precedent and Terry v. Ohio? Was precedent followed or not? Some of the case dis-

cussions seem inserted as though a manuscript reviewer wrote, “This book needs cases”; so

in went some cases. This study, however, is not about how precedent works, but if precedent

works. It does, but judges bring their own preferences to the judicial conference table, too.

We also might be interested in whether ideology or precedent was stronger in different

historical periods of that half-century. The liberal Warren court of the 1950s and 1960s was

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