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"Baum offers a unique perspective on the Supreme Court. He makes a compelling case for reconsidering our traditional understanding of ideological voting on the Court, suggesting that justices' votes may be determined by their disposition toward particular litigants. Presenting a challenging new way to think about decision making on the Court, this is an important book."
--Kevin T. McGuire, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
About the author
Lawrence Baum is professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. His books include
Judges and Their Audiences (Princeton),
The Puzzle of Judicial Behavior, and
Specializing the Courts.
Summary
Ideology in the Supreme Court is the first book to analyze the process by which the ideological stances of U.S. Supreme Court justices translate into the positions they take on the issues that the Court addresses. Eminent Supreme Court scholar Lawrence Baum argues that the links between ideology and issues are not simply a matter of reasoning logically from general premises. Rather, they reflect the development of shared understandings among political elites, including Supreme Court justices. And broad values about matters such as equality are not the only source of these understandings. Another potentially important source is the justices' attitudes about social or political groups, such as the business community and the Republican and Democratic parties.
The book probes these sources by analyzing three issues on which the relative positions of liberal and conservative justices changed between 1910 and 2013: freedom of expression, criminal justice, and government "takings" of property. Analyzing the Court's decisions and other developments during that period, Baum finds that the values underlying liberalism and conservatism help to explain these changes, but that justices' attitudes toward social and political groups also played a powerful role.
Providing a new perspective on how ideology functions in Supreme Court decision making, Ideology in the Supreme Court has important implications for how we think about the Court and its justices.
Additional text
"Baum persuasively illustrates the underlying complexity of ideology as not just a product of justices' values, but of the way justices' decisions are affected by social and political groups as well. According to Baum, by giving more attention to group affect as a source of polarity, scholars can gain a richer sense of ideology as an element in decision making in the Supreme Court."
