Reddit reviews The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

Thanks! (he said hoping that you weren't being sarcastic)

Yeah if you're interested in critical responses to the legal formalist model (which is the model that says that law should be this rationally consistent system of principles that can be merely applied by judges--pretty much the basic thing you learn in civics class) I can suggest reading Sociological Jurisprudence and the Legal Realist critiques as a starting point because they are pretty well known (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound for the former, Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank for the latter).

Then maybe you want to look at some of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which basically says that the law is a social tool used to systematically disadvantage certain groups in society--women, people of color, homosexuals, etc--while maintaining the illusion of moral superiority by hiding behind the idea that "the law" is this perfect, reasonable system divorced from political and social concerns. Though while I see their arguments' value I find CLS either incredibly dull and repetitive or upsettingly polemic and inflammatory.

I find the most compelling work to be the relatively new field of Judicial Politics though, since it kind of brings social science tools (like behavioral models) to bear on the judiciary. The seminal model here is definitely Segel and Spaeth although there has been some movement since then obviously. Basically this says that judges decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, just like Congressman decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, and then just come up with a legal reason (not necessarily consciously so, but you can tell a lot more about how a Supreme Court Justice will behave in the future by looking at their policy preferences than by looking at their legal opinions). Not that there aren't plenty of problems in this field (like I said, the Formalist Model was so dominant for so long that people really haven't been studying the judiciary in a social scientific way for very long) but I think that everyone who is at all interested in either Law or Public Policy needs to read at least some of their work.

Sorry for the massive reading list, but I figured you rarely get the opportunity to actually change someone's mind on the internet!

I should always be working on my dissertation, I feel, but that's not always possible. Subtle difference.

As for reading? The go-to books are Segal and Spaeth, Epstein and Knight, and for a bonus, Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck. Also, take a gander at Esptein's CV or any of the authors listed. They sometimes have accessible (re: free) articles. Epstein's CV also includes access to the Judicial Common Space scores, which are ideology scores for the Supreme Court.

As for what I want to be researching? Legitimacy, without a doubt. The globalization of law. Law as a recolonizing tool. Comparative constitutional structures. Symbols of law in pop culture. There are a myriad of things that interest me with several common themes.