Like The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, the purpose of this book is to scientifically analyze and explain the Supreme Court, its processes, and its decisions from an attitudinal perspective. While changes in judicial policy over the past ten years would have warranted an updated second edition to our original work, changes in public scholarship require something more.

Two specific changes bear initial mention. First is the rise of rational choice scholarship on the Court, as intuitively exemplified by Lee Epstein and Jack Knight's The Choice Justices Make and formally exemplified by John Ferejohn and Charles Shipan's “Congressional Influence on Bureaucracy,” an article more influential in the judicial studies than in either the congressional or bureaucratic literatures.

Second is the rise in the testing of legal variables. Various critics of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model have noted that our evidence against the legal model consisted solely of anecdotal evidence. Based on what we hope is a more refined explanation of the legal model, we now provide tests of at least some of its tenets.

The result is a newly titled book that in name and substance will be familiar to readers of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, but which nevertheless provides important new material.

Chapter 1, “Supreme Court Policy Making”: The book begins with an explanation of what courts do and why their activity results in policy making. The chapter is updated to take into account, first, the historic Bush v. Gore decision, and second, the changes in the relationship between the federal and state judicial systems wrought by the Supreme Court's invigoration of the sovereign state immunity doctrine.