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One of the most controversial and discussed periods in the history of the world’s most prominent court, the United States Supreme Court, is the era of the Depression and the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt. In that era, the Court encountered a rapid, Presidentially-inspired expansion of the role of government in the economy, implemented via an alphabet soup of new agencies set up to improve the economic and social well being of the populace. The Roosevelt Court first bitterly resisted, then, after the clichéd switch in time that saved nine, acknowledged the legitimacy of and developed doctrine to support government agency efforts to promote social welfare. That acknowledgement and doctrine did not guarantee that the Supreme Court would automatically support government social welfare policy when it reached the Court – we know that its tendency to do so has varied across time. They did, however, significantly change the Court’s agenda, leading to a diminution of the number and proportion of docketed cases involving economic regulation. In the wake of the Depression, litigation involving government social agencies has surely become commonplace in courts around the world. Whether such litigation ends up in the highest courts and what happens to it when it does is less certain. Our experience in coding and working with data from the countries included in the High Court Judicial Data Base suggests that High Court treatment of government social agencies is a matter for considerable theoretical and policy interest. (The High Courts Judicial Data Base is funded by National Science Foundation Law and Social Science awards to Stacia L. Haynie (Louisiana State University), Reginald Sheehan (Michigan State University), Donald R. Songer (University of South Carolina) and C. Neal Tate (Vanderbilt University). The goal of the project is to create a multinational public access data base of Supreme Court decisions that will support advances in research in the comparative study of courts and judges. The project is currently ongoing. Rodelio C. Manacsa is a graduate research assistant on the project.) We propose in this paper to conduct a preliminary analysis of the extent to which several national High Courts entertain litigation involving government social welfare agencies and how they treat claims made by or against those agencies. We will focus most extensively on the Supreme Court of the Philippines because available data make it possible to extend this analysis over 40 years of decision making and because we know from our work with the Philippine data that the Philippine Supreme Court has played an important role in shaping government social policy at the grass roots level. We also plan to analyze (as our data make possible) the experience of the Indian Supreme Court, an institution that has taken an explicit social policy stance in favor of the underprivileged. The experience of the Philippine and Indian Supreme Courts will be contrasted with that of the United States Supreme Court and, as time and data make possible, the Supreme Courts of Canada and South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]