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Scholars have been limited in the development and testing of theory regarding the incidence and impact of organized interest advocacy at the U.S. Supreme Court due to a critical measurement issue - the inability to properly locate these interests in the legal policy space in which the Court operates. We treat the positions articulated by organized interests in their amicus curiae briefs as "votes" in Court cases, allowing us to use an IRT model to estimate the locations of both the 600 most active organized interests and the justices in the same legal policy space. The resulting ideal point estimates yield substantive implications (e.g., the distribution of organized interest ideal points is slightly to the left of the justices) and lend themselves to a number of future applications to important questions involving judicial politics in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Solicitor General (SG) is the most direct link between the executive branch and the Supreme Court. Spatial models of the SG's involvement at the Court necessitate locating the SG in the same policy space as the justices. We treat the SG's positions advocated in amicus curiae briefs as equivalent to votes in these cases and employ an item response model that yields facially valid estimates of the locations of the SGs and justices serving during the Eisenhower through Obama administrations. We find that the ideological orientation of the appointing president has a strong effect on the location of the SGs. There is mixed evidence of SGs orienting themselves toward the median justice on the Court, implying that SGs might also serve a second principal in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars suggest that judges have an incentive to use complex language to increase support for their decisions. Research on the effects of processing fluency, however, points towards a different set of expectations. Using a survey experiment, we manipulate the complexity of the language conveying two Court decisions and two types of source cue. For the less polarizing of the two decisions, we find that by decreasing processing fluency, complex decision language can both decrease acceptance of the decision and diminish the importance of source cues in arriving at this judgment. Legalistic terminology, however, increases acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why will organized interests choose to lobby the U.S. Supreme Court by submitting amicus curiae briefs? This article argues that organized interests are most likely to lobby the Court when conditions increase their expectation of influencing the Court's policy outputs. However, when deciding which policy venue to lobby, organized interests that rely on membership support will also have to consider the effect of their lobbying decisions on their ability to attract and retain members. Analysis of the amicus curiae brief filings of 579 organized interests suggests that an interest is more likely to submit amicus briefs at the Supreme Court when the Court is receptive to the positions advocated by the interest and the interest has participated at the Court in the past. The results also indicate that membership-based groups will take into account the extent to which relevant cases have been covered by the media when choosing whether to lobby the Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]