Making the Supreme Court

Reviews / Votes

The book's discussion of the evolution of procedural dynamics is supported by relevant graphs, tables, and surveys. This book will become a classic illustration of the use of empirical analysis for explaining public policy. * Choice * [This] book is much more than a political history. The authors undertake their project broadly, building and testing nested models of presidents and senators filling Supreme Court vacancies to advance their political goals under the scrutiny of the mass media and the American people. Although the authors disavow attempting to develop a unified, general theory of judicial appointments, they nevertheless propose a compelling mosaic of theory and evidence describing the processes that fill and animate the Supreme Court. * Joseph Ura, Congress & The Presidency * The book is a great success. Cameron and Kastellec's analyses of the many stages in the construction of the Supreme Court are separately well-done and, together, stack into a solid account of Supreme Court appointments. The authors' data will circulate widely, stimulating new empirical research in judicial politics well beyond the problems of nominations and confirmations, and their theoretical arguments will exert substantial gravity on the study of appointment politics going forward. The book is well worth a place in any graduate or advanced undergraduate course on judicial politics, but students and scholars of the presidency, Congress, and public management would also learn much from it. * Joseph Ura, Congress & the Presidency * Making the Supreme Court...stands alone as the most ambitious empirical analysis of how the Supreme Court is constructed politically. No other books come close to matching its exhaustive analyses of the data pertaining to how presidents, senators, interest groups, and party leaders and activists construct the composition and direction of the nation's highest Court. ... To say the least, no one who wishes to learn from or do any seriously empirical work on the shaping of the Supreme Court can ignore it. * Michael J. Gerhardt, Political Science Quarterly *