Toward an Integration of Public Law and Judicial Behavior

TLDR: In this paper, voting records of individual justices are examined to uncover regularities in behavior and to provide the basis for inferring the attitudes of judges toward the substantive issues raised, and evidence derived both from observations of voting patterns and from interviews with judges seems

Abstract: THE VIEW OF JUDGES as political actors whose attitudes toward subtantive policy issues often influence their decisions is the cornerstone of judicial behavioralism. The assumption is that there is ". . . a kind of stare deciks underlying the Supreme Court's decisions but that it is based on personal rather than institutional precedents."' Voting records of individual justices are examined to uncover regularities in behavior and to provide the basis for inferring the attitudes of judges toward the substantive issues raised. Of course, if each justice were merely following his conscience on a case by case basis, a random, rather that a persistent, coalitional pattern of voting would emerge. Evidence derived both from observations of voting patterns and from interviews with judges seems