This book will almost certainly be a “must read” in classes on judicial politics and in seminars on American political institutions. The authors intentionally developed a very simple model, and so the book is accessible to, and appropriate for, undergraduates as well as graduate students without much formal-theoretic training. Despite the model's simplicity, the substantive topics that the authors engage with the model make it useful for graduate seminars, if only as a jumping-off point for motivating empirical tests or as a foil for the development of more sophisticated models.

Thomas Hammond, Chris Bonneau, and Reginald Sheehan focus on developing an integrated model of each stage of the Supreme Court's decision-making process. Their analysis includes the Court's certiorari decision, the initial conference vote, opinion assignment, and the final coalition and vote. Justices understand not only that their decisions at each stage can affect outcomes at other stages of the decision-making process, but also that expectations about their decisions affect the decisions other justices take at each stage as well.

Formal models of decision-making processes with multiple stages can quickly become notationally dense, unfriendly to readers not trained in formal theory, and intractable for the analysts. The authors here avoid that problem by imposing strong assumptions to simplify their analysis. This permits them to integrate the several stages of the Court's decision-making process while keeping their analysis accessible to scholars and students untrained in formal theory. They explicitly note these assumptions and discuss how their conclusions might change when those assumptions are relaxed.

Perhaps the most provocative substantive result of the book is what I term the “strategy ineffectiveness result.” Under two versions of the model—the “open-bidding version” and the “median-holdout version”—the legal policy endorsed by the Court in its final opinion always converges to the preference of the median voter. That means that strategic behavior in opinion assignment, the conference vote, and at the certiorari stage do not matter because the final outcome in the last stage of the decision-making process will always be the most-preferred legal policy of the median voter. In these versions of the model, Hammond, Bonneau, and Sheehan provide us a strategic account for why strategic behavior among the justices might not affect the final outcome of the cases they decide. This is a fun and provocative conclusion. (Under the “agenda-control version” of the model, in which the authors assume that justices will join a draft majority opinion if it is better than the status quo for those justices, strategic behavior would have some effect on outcomes. Nonetheless, as the authors point out, the agenda-control version of the model is inconsistent with the basic assumption that justices seek to maximize their policy payoffs.)

While I regard the simplicity of the model in this book as a virtue overall, the authors do occasionally exhibit a mild form of analytical schizophrenia in recognizing, on the one hand, that they need to make very strong assumptions in order to derive interesting results from a very simple model, yet, on the other hand, insisting that their results imply the necessity of a “substantial revision” of much of the scholarship in judicial politics (p. 231). I would have preferred more tentative assertion of the implications of some of the results derived in the book.

Some of the more important assumptions the authors make (and which they admit are strong) include the assumption that writing opinions is costless for the justices, that justices are not limited in the number of cases they can decide, and that justices do not consider the impact of a decision in one case on decisions they make in other cases or future cases. Other important assumptions include perfect information and a unidimensional policy space.

Consider, for example, the assumption that justices do not face decision costs. Of particular concern in light of the substantive results derived from the model is, first, the implicit assumption that the justices face no opportunity costs in granting certiorari to a case and, secondly, that writing an opinion is costless to the justices (p. 94). (To be sure, the authors explicitly assume only that writing a majority opinion is costless, but there is no reason to assume that writing effort is costless only if four other justices agree with you.)

These strong assumptions, along with others, suggest that the results of the model in this book are likely to be sensitive to these assumptions, and that substantive conclusions drawn from these results should be asserted with some caution. For example, on the basis of the model, the authors write that notions of strategic certiorari granting—“aggressive granting” and “defensive denial”—could be “abandoned without any significant loss in our understanding of the Supreme Court's decisions on certiorari” (p. 234). Well, maybe. But given that current cases set precedents for future cases and that only a limited number of cases can be reviewed by the Court, one can conceive of models in which those words continue to identify meaningful behavior. For example, in his 2000 book Constitutional Process: A Social Choice Analysis of Supreme Court Decision Making, Max Stearns argues that the order in which cases are decided can become a strategic variable in leading the Court to decisions different than they would make if they decided the cases in a different sequence. In situations when justices are maximizing payoffs over sets of current and future cases, they might oppose certiorari in a particular case for which, if considered in isolation from other cases and future cases, they would support the granting of certiorari.

More broadly, the need for “strategic behavior” disappears in a world without constraints. But impose limits on time, information, and resources, and the door opens to realizing positive payoffs for strategic behavior. And contrary to the “agenda-setting model” in this book, relaxing these assumptions accounts for strategic behavior in a way consistent with the model's underlying postulates, rather than contrary to them.

None of these quibbles should be taken to minimize the many virtues of this book. The authors have developed a single simple, accessible model. From this model they have deduced behavioral and substantive implications that move from the beginning of official Supreme Court decision making to its conclusion. They provide scholars and students with an introduction to formal theorizing about the Supreme Court, and point the way to modeling more sophisticated theories.