¹ Snyder, Richard C., “A Decision-Making Approach to the Study of Political Phenomena,” in Young, Roland (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1958), p. 13Google Scholar. Cf. Foster H. Sherwood, “The Role of Public Law in Political Science,” ibid., p. 87: “public law [has] all but disappeared as a recognized object of study for political science.” Sherwood adds, p. 89, that public law, properly conceived as a body of relevant political data, “is within political science, and not at its borders.”

² Truman, David B., “The Impact on Political Science of the Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences,” in Research Frontiers in Politics and Government: Brookings Lectures, 1955 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1955), p. 203Google Scholar.

³ Ibid., pp. 204–208, 214.

⁴ Joseph Tanenhaus, “The Uses and Limitations of Social Science Methods in Analyzing Judicial Behavior” (presented at a panel of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 7, 1956; mimeo., 22 pages plus footnotes and appendices.)

⁵ Glendon A. Schubert, Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior, to be published shortly under the joint auspices of the Bureau of Social and Political Research, Michigan State University and the Free Press.

⁶ Peltason, Jack, Federal Courts in the Political Process (New York, 1955), pp. 1–2Google Scholar. Cf. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 88.

⁷ Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955); Hannegan v. Esquire, 327 U.S. 146 (1946).

⁸ Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956); Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

⁹ Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957); Sacher v. United States, 356 U.S. 576 (1958).

¹⁰ Emphasis added. See, e.g., the 1957 Annual Report.

¹¹ Note, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 69 (February, 1955), pp. 712–713Google Scholar.

^11a There have been critics outside the profession; see Pritchett, op. cit., fn. 13, below, pp. 189, 191, 275.

^11b In describing Clark as “powerful,” I employ the concept of “power” as defined by the Shapley-Shubik index, a probability measure of the extent to which any justice's votes were pivotal in the winning majority coalition which controlled the decisions. See below, fn. 28, op. cit.

¹² Time Magazine, Vol. LXVII, No. 26 (June 25, 1956), p. 14Google Scholar.

¹³ Pritchett, C. Herman, Civil Liberties and the Vinson Court (Chicago, 1954), p. 183Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Majority control was not actually achieved until January 1, 1958, when Governor Williams' Attorney General, Thomas Kavanaugh, replaced expatriate-Democrat Sharpe.

¹⁵ For a detailed explanation, see op. cit. above, note 5, ch. 5.

¹⁶ This particular period was chosen because it includes the “source group” cases in the article by Fred Kort to be discussed below. See ftn. 20, infra.

¹⁷ The reason for excluding unanimous and near-unanimous decisions from the denominator of the fraction is the much greater probability that there will be no inconsistent votes in such decisions than in those in which the Court is more divided. (The CR for unanimous decisions must, of course, be 1.000.) See Torgerson, Warren S., Theory and Methods of Scaling (New York, 1958), p. 324Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Barnard, Jessie, “Dimensions and Axes of Supreme Court Decisions,” Social Forces, Vol. 34 (October, 1955), pp. 19–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ I have used the following symbols in Figures 6 to 8:

+ = Voted in favor of the defendant

− = Voted against the defendant

‘ ’ = Wrote opinion

( ) = Joined in the Opinion of the Court

( = Joined in concurring opinion

) = Joined in dissenting opinion

Y =Did not participate in the decision (a blank cell signifies that the justice was not a member of the Court at the time the case was decided).

[ ] Denotes an inconsistent vote

For example, the composite symbol (‘+’) means that the justice wrote the Opinion of the Court in a case decided by a majority of positive votes. Or, if a justice joined in a dissenting opinion written by another justice, in a case decided by a negative majority (i.e., voting against the defendant), the appropriate combination of symbols to signify his position would be +).

²⁰ For two recent reports of applications of cumulative scaling to the analysis of legislative voting, see Farris, Charles D., “A Method of Determining Ideological Groupings in the Congress,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 20 (May, 1958), pp. 308–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Belknap, George M., “A Method for Analyzing Legislative Behavior,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 2 (November, 1958), pp. 377–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Kort, Fred, “Predicting Supreme Court Decisions Mathematically: A Quantitative Analysis of the ‘Right to Counsel’ Cases,” this Review, Vol. 51 (March, 1957), pp. 1–12Google Scholar.

²² Fisher, Franklin M., “The Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions: The Use and Abuse of Quantitative Methods,” this Review, Vol. 52 (June, 1958), pp. 321–338Google Scholar; Fred Kort, “Reply to Fisher's Mathematical Analysis of Supreme Court Decisions,” ibid., pp. 339–348.

^22a Op. cit., fn. 5 above, ch. 5, Appendix E: “Statistical Inference and Judicial Behavior: A Comment Upon the Kort-Fisher Mélange.”

²³ Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).

²⁴ According to the prediction, all six of the state search and seizure cases should have been decided in favor of the defendants; in fact, only one of the six was a pro decision.

²⁵ I used Kendall's tau (beta) formula, which takes tied ranks into consideration, for the computation of these rank correlation coefficients. The formula is:

For an explanation of the method, see Kendall, Maurice A., Rank Correlation Method (London: Chas. Griffin, 1948 ed.), pp. 4–5, 17–18, 25–27, 40–43Google Scholar. The formula is presented at p. 26.

²⁶ Cf. Robert N. Ford's discussion of “simple scaling” in Riley, M. W., Riley, J. W., and Toby, J., Sociological Studies in Scale Analysis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), pp. 297–298Google Scholar. Ford shows that when the simple sum of correct responses is substituted for scale scores (in a study involving a small number of questions and a large number of respondents), the resulting ranks for 96 per cent of the respondents did not deviate by more than one rank from scale rarks derived from scale scores.

²⁷ For an extended discussion of the theory, written by mathemeticians for a social science audience, see Luce, R. Duncan and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Shapley, L. S. and Shubik, Martin, “A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System,” this Review, Vol. 48 (September, 1954), pp. 791–792Google Scholar.

²⁹ Herdman v. Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 352 U.S. 518 (1957).

³⁰ See, e.g., DeParcq, William H., “The Supreme Court and the Federal Employers' Liability Act, 1956–1957 Term,” Texas Law Review, Vol. 36 (December, 1957) pp. 145–156Google Scholar; and Thomas Gibbs Gee, “A Dissenting Postscript or, Notes from Underground,” ibid., pp. 157–160.