IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v87y1993i03p717-726_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lawyers, Organized Interests, and the Law of Obscenity: Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court

Author

Listed:
  • McGuire, Kevin T.
  • Caldeira, Gregory A.

Abstract

Each year thousands of cases and litigants come to the Supreme Court. How can the Court find the most important cases to decide? The law of obscenity illustrates particularly well the Court's problem as it constructs its plenary agenda. Using data drawn from petitions for certiorari and jurisdictional statements filed with the Supreme Court from 1955 to 1987, we formulate and test a model of case selection in which professional obscenity lawyers and organized interests figure as critical elements in the process of agenda building. We also encounter strong evidence of the Court's differential treatment of several different litigants. Moreover, the calculus of selection changed markedly over time, as the Court itself changed; the Burger Court and Warren Court weighed several of the criteria quite differently.

Suggested Citation

  • McGuire, Kevin T. & Caldeira, Gregory A., 1993. "Lawyers, Organized Interests, and the Law of Obscenity: Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(3), pages 717-726, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:87:y:1993:i:03:p:717-726_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400100930/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. De Figueiredo, John M. & De Figueiredo, Rui J. P. Jr., 2002. "The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation," Working papers 4247-02, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    2. Jeff Yates & Damon M. Cann & Brent D. Boyea, 2013. "Judicial Ideology and the Selection of Disputes for U.S. Supreme Court Adjudication," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 10(4), pages 847-865, December.
    3. Maxwell Mak & Andrew H. Sidman & Udi Sommer, 2013. "Is Certiorari Contingent on Litigant Behavior? Petitioners' Role in Strategic Auditing," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 10(1), pages 54-75, March.
    4. John M. de Figueiredo, 2009. "Integrated Political Strategy," NBER Working Papers 15053, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Ganghof, Steffen & Manow, Philip, 2005. "Mechanismen der Politik: Strategische Interaktion im deutschen Regierungssystem," Schriften aus dem Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Köln, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, volume 54, number 54.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:87:y:1993:i:03:p:717-726_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.