The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case it accepts for only 60 minutes, except under extraordinary circumstances. Later in the same week that it hears oral arguments, the justices meet in conference to take a preliminary vote in the case and otherwise continue the process of arriving at a decision. The argument of this book can be stated succinctly: The oral arguments matter. Ryan Black, Timothy Johnson, and Justin Wedeking support their argument by showing that what one would predict for the oral-argument process if oral arguments did matter in the Court terms under analysis in fact holds true.

The book consists of five chapters. The first is an Introduction with some theoretical and substantive background; the last is a Conclusion, briefly summarizing the argument of the book and advocating both the substantive and the civic importance of oral arguments. In between are three chapters of analysis in support of the main argument. Chapter 2 analyzes the justices’ interruptions of each other during the hour of oral arguments for 681 cases heard from 1998 through 2007. Chapters 3 amd 4 primarily analyze the notes taken during oral arguments by Justices Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell. Blackmun and Powell left scholars the notes they took during oral arguments over their entire Supreme Court careers, the 1970 through 1993 terms for Blackmun and the 1971 through 1986 terms for Powell. Chapter 3 focuses on the amount of notes the two justices took and to which speakers the notes refer. Blackmun’s notes frequently contain his predictions concerning colleagues’ votes, and Chapter 4 analyzes these predictions.

Using statistical techniques to analyze oral-transcript data, Black, Johnson, and Wedeking reveal a number of interesting and suggestive characteristics of the oral-argument process and, then, apply these techniques to the Blackmun and Powell notes to characterize how these justices made use of it. The meaning of statistical significance here is questionable because it is unclear in what sense the data constitute a sample, but the techniques do clarify the relationships between variables, and the authors make substantive significance nicely evident by means of figures. For example, their graphs make plain that justices are more inclined to interrupt when they have issue expertise and when they are ideologically more distant from the speaker—and they are especially likely to interrupt those who have interrupted them!

Turning to the notes Justices Blackmun and Powell took during oral arguments, the authors find, not unsurprisingly, that in some ways their practices were similar. For example, both tended to note fewer comments by colleagues the longer they had worked with them. In other ways, however, they were strikingly different. Blackmun tended to note comments by justices far from him ideologically while Powell tended to record those by justices close to him. The authors attribute this to coalition-building intentions: “Because Powell was often the median on the Court, he had an incentive to pay more attention to colleagues who were ideologically proximate to him on either side of the ideological divide because he needed to decide which coalition to join. Conversely, Blackmun was more of an ideologue (conservative in his early years and later liberal) and therefore needed to seek information to combat potential opposing coalitions” (p. 82). This explanation is indeed plausible. It would be interesting to probe this through a further exploration of Blackmun’s behavior. For in Blackmun’s ideological journey, there was a point—during the natural Court from the 1975 through 1980 terms—when he was the median justice on most issues. One wonders whether his notetaking was more like Powell’s during that period.

For examining the use of oral arguments to predict voting coalitions, the authors have to make do with only Justice Blackmun, who in his oral-argument notes made at least some voting predictions in 19% of the cases, for a total of 8% of individual justice votes predicted. He was correct about 75% of the time. Again, the authors analyze the data with a multivariate statistical model, but their graphs reveal the variables’ substantive significance. Not surprisingly, Blackmun is more likely to predict and be more accurate at predicting a colleague’s behavior the more references he makes to the colleague in his notes. More interesting, Blackmun is more likely to predict and be more accurate at predicting a colleague’s behavior the more distant he is from the colleague ideologically, and this is net of the number of references to the colleague. Other notable findings are that Blackmun is more likely to predict and is better at predicting the outcome of cases in which he has issue expertise, and in cases in which more amicus briefs are filed, which the authors use as a measure of complexity.

The findings in the three analytic chapters generally support the thesis of the book, in that predictions made assuming that the oral arguments process matters are supported, for the most part. Thus, Chapter 2 essentially shows that justices treat the hour of oral arguments as if it were important, Chapter 3 shows that Justices Blackmun and Powell took notes during oral arguments as one would expect if they were pondering coalition formation, and Chapter 4 supports the premise that Blackmun was making vote predictions during oral arguments in a purposeful way.

Finally, the analysis in this book hints at two interesting issues that it, however, leaves unexplored; hope that these authors or other scholars might address them in the future. First, three elements of any case heard by the Supreme Court are the decision in the case, the content of all the opinions, and the process of reaching the first two outcomes. This book is convincing that oral arguments matter for the last of these elements, the process, but the question still remains whether we need to pay attention to oral arguments if we are only interested in the decision or the content of the opinions. Second, scholars of the Supreme Court frequently prefer to generalize their findings not just for a few justices but for most of justices. These authors have oral-argument notes from only two justices and predictions from only one, but they see these as suggestive for Supreme Court decision making in general. But, I wonder, how much is Blackmun being a typical Supreme Court justice and how much is he being just Blackmun?

Regardless of these issues, Oral Arguments and Coalition Formation on the U.S. Supreme Court presents a clear and fascinating analysis of an understudied part of the Court’s decision making and is a valuable contribution to our understanding of this institution.