Supreme Court Decision Making: The Impact of Court Composition on State and Local Government Litigation

This article examines the participation and success rates of state and local governments before the U.S. Supreme Court during 1953–1989. We find that they have experienced greater access to the Court over time, and that they have been winning an increasingly higher proportion of cases when appearing as direct parties, with some interesting variations depending on the type of case and litigants. Time-series analysis indicates that the most important factor in state and local success is the increasingly conservative ideology of the Court from the Warren years to the Rehnquist Court. An exception to improved performance is federalism cases. The findings have implications for the future character of American federalism and the development of a general model of judicial decision making.