The solicitor general of the United States occupies a unique position in the federal government, not only as the only member of the government legally required to be learned in the law, but also as the main legal representation of the United States. Beginning with Galanter (1974) and continuing...

The Court's agenda is a finite resource. The Court can only accept so many cases given its institutional responsibility to screen thousands of petitions, allocate time for oral arguments, and then construct opinions to justify the decisions both to the legal community and the broader public....

In their seminal article on the historical rise of dissent activity, Walker, Dixon, and Epstein (1988) consider a number of competing hypotheses, such as the transition to a discretionary docket, changes in caseload levels, and alteration of the Courtﾒs membership, before ultimately...

Scholars have been intrigued by the abrupt change in the rate of nonconsensual opinions that the Supreme Court has published over time, which substantially increased beginning with the battles concerning the court's New Deal transition in the 1930s. Notwithstanding, none of the prior studies on...