"Relisting" on the Burger Court, 1971-1985 Terms

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project extends the Expanded U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database to include variables pertaining to the "relisted" cases of the Burger Court. During the Burger Court, any justice could have a case relisted - held over until the next scheduled conference, typically seven days later - to delay the certiorari decision. Relisting is one of the only features of the Court's decision-making process not included in any of the NSF databases. Closing this gap is important, not only for the sake of completeness, but also because it will shed light on the justices' employment of strategic behavior. Scholars do not know which of the justices engage in the practice, with what effect, in cases concerning what legal provisions and issues, and at what cost to the Court's productive process. In contrast, scholars do know a great deal about other stages and aspects, but without relevant and systematic information about relisting, we omit consideration of an aspect of agenda setting that may well affect not only the behavior of individual justices, but also the adequacy of hypotheses and theories aimed at explaining the agenda setting behavior of the Court as a policy-making institution. Implementation of this proposal requires systematic examination of all of the several thousand docket sheets of Justices William Brennan and Lewis Powell that identify the occurrence of relisting and the entry of the pertinent data into the existing Burger Court database. This further expanded Burger Court database, like all of the others, will be archived on the World Wide Web.