The Nature of Supreme Court Power
Matthew E. K. Hall - Cambridge University Press, 2013
Few institutions in the world are credited
with initiating and confounding political change on the scale of the United
States Supreme Court. The Court is uniquely positioned to enhance or inhibit
political reform, enshrine or dismantle social inequalities, and expand or
suppress individual rights. Yet despite claims of victory from judicial
activists and complaints of undemocratic lawmaking from the Court's critics,
numerous studies of the Court assert that it wields little real power. This book
examines the nature of Supreme Court power by identifying conditions under which
the Court is successful at altering the behavior of state and private actors.
Employing a series of longitudinal studies that use quantitative measures of
behavior outcomes across a wide range of issue areas, it develops and supports a
new theory of Supreme Court power. Matthew E. K. Hall finds that the Court tends
to exercise power successfully when lower courts can directly implement its
rulings; however, when the Court must rely on non-court actors to implement its
decisions, its success depends on the popularity of those decisions. Overall,
this theory depicts the Court as a powerful institution, capable of exerting
significant influence over social change.
