Rethinking Early Judicial Involvement in Foreign Affairs: An Empirical Study of the Supreme Court's Docket.

This article presents a new understanding of early judicial involvement in foreign affairs by challenging both the method and the substance of the current debate. Taking signals from the decisions they read, lawyers and scholars alike thus far have looked for cohesion or disjuncture among comments in a limited subset of the most cited cases and primary sources. Such a strategy is analytically dubious and has allowed scholars to address only those materials most congenial to their own positions. In contrast, this article suggests that a wider examination of cases is necessary to move past the present stalemate.