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The salience of judicial institutions in democratic and nondemocratic countries has increased, making it important to have women on these powerful and visible decision-making bodies. Yet, women have only recently gained entrance to peak judicial bodies including constitutional and supreme courts. The appointment of the first woman to a high court is a historic landmark, breaking traditional ideas of who can and should be on the court. Using a global, longitudinal data set we show that certain explanatory factors matter differently in wealthy, stable democracies and in developing countries. The method of selecting high court justices exerts influence in wealthy, stable democracies but not newer ones. Further, our findings suggest that in both sets of countries, appointments to high courts are not made in a domestic vacuum and are influenced by international norms of having women participate in governing institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines state supreme court implementation of Supreme Court precedent when deciding cases challenging state legislation. While previous research provides a wealth of insight into how state contextual and institutional features constrain state court decisionmaking and how lower courts respond to Supreme Court precedent, very little research explicitly examines state court decisionmaking when both constraints are present. By integrating the findings of previous research, 1 develop and test hypotheses about the effect of these different actors on state court decisionmaking. The results show that state courts are indeed constrained by both state and federal actors. The results also suggest that there may be instances where policies are so salient to both state actors and to the U.S. Supreme Court that the influence of the state court's own policy preferences may be minimal. The findings provide important evidence about the importance of competing constraints on state supreme court decisionmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the Supreme Court's most famous cases—from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—have been decided only after being held over and argued a second time. While few cases take this path, scholars have offered no systematic account for why the Court would ever take such a tack. We develop hypotheses about when reargument is most likely to occur, and test them on all formally decided cases between 1946 and 1985. More specifically, we focus on how justices' uncertainty about case outcomes affects the Court's decision to seek reargument. Our findings demonstrate that reargument is most likely to occur when multiple levels of uncertainty are present, even when we control for other factors that have been raised as explanations for this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the behavioral patterns of justices who have sat on the US Supreme Court for ten or more terms, and commenced or completed their services between 1937 and 1993, to ascertain whether political preferences of the justices change over a time. Classes of preference-based theories that dominate contemporary research on the Court; Responses given by judicial specialists; What the data reveal; Discussion based on the findings.

Presents the results of a study which examined the extent to which the US Supreme Court acts as an opinion leader through its ability to induce attitude change. Previous research; Use of an experimental design with liberal and conservative rulings on one economic and one civil liberties issue in comparing the influence of the Supreme Court and a nonpartisan think tank as sources of policies; Conclusions.

Assesses the US Supreme Court's decision in `Lamb's Chapel versus Center Moriches' on the geographic constituencies involved in the case. Supreme Court and public opinion; Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion; Political significance of the Court's decision only on a local or regional basis.