IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v89y1995i03p691-702_09.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Issue Fluidity on the U.S. Supreme Court

Author

Listed:
  • McGuire, Kevin T.
  • Palmer, Barbara

Abstract

In making decisions on the merits, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court are often willing to provide authoritative answers to questions that have not been asked and to disregard issues that the parties have presented. What accounts for these forms of issue fluidity? Analyzing data from the 1988 term of the Court, we find that issue transformation is quite common, occurring in roughly half of the cases on the plenary agenda. We propose models of both issue discovery and issue suppression that, while successful in explaining how the justices select issues, suggest that these two forms of fluidity result from largely different influences.

Suggested Citation

  • McGuire, Kevin T. & Palmer, Barbara, 1995. "Issue Fluidity on the U.S. Supreme Court," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 89(3), pages 691-702, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:89:y:1995:i:03:p:691-702_09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400097252/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. Tom S Clark, 2016. "Scope and precedent: judicial rule-making under uncertainty," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 28(3), pages 353-384, July.

    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:89:y:1995:i:03:p:691-702_09. 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.