Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth are back again, as feisty as ever, challenging friend and foe alike and vigorously defending their well-known and much-controverted “attitudinal model,” albeit with a few concessions here and there to critics of various stripes. The original version of this book, published in 1993, made a major splash and became the subject, or should I say object, of many roundtables, panels, and symposia and the motivation for numerous articles. Without a doubt, no matter how one views its intellectual merits, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model was, and is, one of the most important books on law and judicial politics published in the last 25 years. It made a major intellectual mark on the subfield and, I believe, in American politics more generally, and lately it has received a lot of notice from professors of law. For its critics, it is a book they love to hate; for the faithful, it serves as the urtext; and, for the rest, it is an endless source of hypotheses, data, and ideas for further research.

Segal and Spaeth, I suppose, could just as appropriately have labeled this a second edition. Their decision to use the term “revisited” probably stems from the main motivation of a new version: not to provide the newest data or the latest decisions, although they do this in many places, but, rather, to deal with and integrate intellectual currents in the field that they did not address the first time around. So, if one puts the two versions side by side, one quickly notices that the authors have eliminated the chapter on judicial impact and then rearranged the theoretical chapters to take into account developments in positive political theory and the “new” institutionalism. For my money, dropping the chapter on judicial impact is a blessing; this literature is, to put it mildly, not a hotbed of intellectual inquiry these days, and it did not fit well with the theoretical focus of the rest of the book. Its presence in the 1992 version probably reflected a desire for completeness in coverage or perhaps the marketplace for textbooks.

Now, in connection with the last point, I did not and still do not understand why Segal and Spaeth include a very long chapter (60 pages) on the history of the Supreme Court. It is, of course, good fun to read because it so well reflects the authors' hard-baked view of the Court and its decisions and is very much in the style of seat-of-the-pants political analysis for which Thomas R. Powell, Thurman Arnold, Edward S. Corwin, Robert Cushman, and many others were famous in the salad days of public law, when a long discussion of the Court's term appeared each year in the American Political Science Review. Yet in a book the purpose of which is to present and test an explicit, scientific model of judicial behavior, this chapter sits rather oddly. And even if one puts intellectual consistency aside, their discussion of the Court's history is too abbreviated to be convincing and too long to fit well and not interrupt the argument in the rest of the book.

Several other chapters suffer from excessive attention to detail, of a textbookish sort, as, for example, in the discussion of legal requirements for access to the federal courts. If one conceives of this book, as I do, as a scientific monograph based on a theoretical model, it is not clear we need a detailed discussion, to name just one example, of pendant and auxiliary jurisdiction. It is nice to have this information in a handy place, but it hardly helps Segal and Spaeth to advance their argument.

In the theoretical section, as I have said, the authors attempt to reconcile their work with alternative approaches to the study of judicial behavior. This is a useful corrective. Nonetheless, the concessions they make to positive political theory and to institutional approaches are fairly minor and give the impression of their having put on patches here and there, rather than truly reformulating their ideas. They continue to hew closely to the notion of justices driven by policy preferences and not much constrained, if at all, by law, precedent, or other institutional actors. Ultimately, Segal and Spaeth stand pat, with a few “ifs” and “buts” here and there. The problem, I think, derives from the lack of a coherent story about how justices proceed from their fundamental values, beliefs, and attitudes to decisions about how to vote, which opinions to join, and so on. Spaeth and company initially proceeded from the theoretical approaches of Rokeach and others; but the world of social psychology went far beyond Rokeach long, long ago, and cognitive models, to give but one example, have come to the fore. In this recent incarnation, Segal and Spaeth briefly discuss “motivated reasoning,” but then let the matter drop, moving on to treat attitudes in very much the same fashion that one would treat preferences or ideal points in a spatial model. The result is to render the phrase “attitudinal model” something of a minomer, for it is in practice the familiar spatial model of voting, in one dimension, with single-peaked preferences, which we see used in the study of voters and legislators, applied to the study of Supreme Court justices. Additionally and relatedly, the term “attitudinal” is also unfortunate because “attitudes” are subject to many and varied conceptualizations; and, so far as I can tell, the authors never spell out which of the various meanings they want to adopt. Do they, for example, mean in their usage of attitude to incorporate the whole range of beliefs, values, and attitudes, or a narrower conception?

Segal and Spaeth, I believe, have given little intellectual ground to opponents. This is both a weakness and a strength. I have already noted the problems with taking this stance. The strength of this approach is that, unlike so many academics, these authors do not waffle on any theoretical or empirical contentions but, rather, set down a bold challenge to others to muster contrary evidence. It is all there in black and white for anyone to controvert, with no secret doors or escape hatches built in for them. The original version, and now its sequel, are particularly impressive in at least three senses: first, in the candor and force with which they set out their views and provide empirical tests of them; second, in distilling and combining a long-term program of research, going back perhaps as far as the 1960s; and, third, in the amazing breadth of the work that Segal and Spaeth, have created, together and on their own, over the last 20 years in the case of the former and nearly 50 in the case of the latter. The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited, and the work it reflects, are major achievements for which students of the Supreme Court are deeply in debt to this pair of distinguished scholars.