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Lawyers, Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the U.S. Supreme Court?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Andrea McAtee  and
Kevin T. McGuire
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Abstract

A good deal of scholarly evidence suggests that the decisionmaking of the U.S. Supreme Court is affected by legal argument. At the same time, it seems clear that in a great many cases the justices have enduring, strongly held views. In such cases, they should be impervious to the effects of advocacy. When are the justices apt to be influenced by the Court's legal community, and when will lawyers be less relevant? The answer, we think, has to do with the salience of the issue before the Court. We suspect that in nonsalient cases the justices have less-intense preferences and therefore are open to the persuasion of lawyers. In salient cases, by contrast, the content of legal policy matters much more to the justices. As a result, they are less amenable to legal argument and adhere more strictly to their personal policy preferences. Our empirical tests support this orientation.

Type
Convincing the Court: Two Studies of Advocacy
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 259 - 278
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Alixandra Yanus for her able assistance in collecting and coding data for this article. They are also grateful for the helpful comments and criticisms of Herbert Kritzer, Lanny Martin, George Rabinowitz, Georg Vanberg, and the anonymous reviewers.

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