Michael Nelson

This is the book that made me want to become a social scientist. I admire it because it does everything social science should do: present a creative and important argument, assess it unsparingly, and communicate it in clear and accessible prose. And it does each of these things uncommonly well. In it, Lee Epstein and Jack Knight argue against the pervasive claim that U.S. Supreme Court justices vote ideologically in every case. Instead, they demonstrate convincingly that justices are constrained by a variety of internal and external constraints: each other, the other branches of government, and the public. They draw their evidence from a variety of sources—game theory, statistical analyses of the justices’ votes, and content analyses of the justices’ private memoranda—to make their case. The result is a rich account of judicial decision-making that scholars still grapple with today.