Placing State Supreme Courts in State Politics

AbstractThis essay places state supreme courts in state politics by tracking some of the major lines of research on these important institutions, documenting the importance of state supreme courts, and illustrating important variations among state supreme courts on a host of factors, including docket composition, the exercise of judicial review, litigant patterns, and turnover rates. Through analyses of original data on separation-of-powers relationships in the abortion controversy, it also provides a brief empirical demonstration of how courts influence and are influenced by the political and policy processes operating in the states, and how comparative research helps resolve fundamental controversies in political science. We conclude that there is a remarkable and unfortunate asymmetry between the political importance of state supreme courts and the attention given to them by the research community. Moreover, by capitalizing on the analytical advantages of comparative state judicial politics scholarship, scholars will be able to solve some of the most complex puzzles in the study of state politics.