Despite its emergence as a key player in igniting policy change, very little work has been done to understand the Supreme Court’s agenda in terms of policy content. Scholars have tended to describe the Court mostly in terms of the direction (liberal/conservative) of justices’ decisions and the significance of particular cases. As a result, I ask if the Supreme Court allocates a disproportionate share of its docket to particular policy areas and if over attention to issue areas can be explained in terms of ideological shifts on the Court. This paper utilizes a new dataset, which includes a sample of 4591 certiorari denied cases and all 7014 cases granted certiorari from 1948 to 1990. Each case is coded for policy content according to the Policy Agendas Project coding scheme. By comparing the policy content of certiorari granted and certiorari denied cases over time, I show that judicial attention to policy areas waxes and wanes and court eras can be differentiated according to which issues occupied a disproportionate share of the Court’s attention. Additionally, I demonstrate that disproportionate attention to a subset of issue areas varies with changes in the ideological makeup of the Court. / text

The Priest-Klein model predicts that a decline in the plaintiff win rate might be explained by a change in stake asymmetry that favors the plaintiff; that is, the stakes for defendants increase. This lowers the plaintiff win rate because defendants increasingly look to settle cases they are less likely to win, leading them to only go to trial with cases they have a comparably higher probability of winning. We theorize a shift like this might have occurred between 1985 and 1995, as Lahav and Siegelman (2017) recently discovered that the plaintiff win rate fell from almost 70% in 1985 to just over 30% in 1995. Although they found that changing judicial caseloads and other factors represented a notable portion of the decline, they were unable to identify what drove the remaining 40%. We hypothesize that this unexplained decline was caused by increasing defendant stakes and examine two potential drivers of increasing stake asymmetry: changing judicial ideology and a rise in the number of Multi-District Litigation (MDL) cases, a type of case with higher defendant stakes. We find evidence consistent with the Priest-Klein model for MDL cases as these cases experienced lower adjudication rates, lower plaintiff win rates, and higher settlement rates. Additionally, we found that judicial ideology was substantially more important for MDL cases, suggesting that judges might make use of their greater influence in these cases to guide outcomes. Yet, while both MDL case status and judicial ideology were statistically significant predictors of plaintiff win rates, we found that neither explains a substantial portion of the decline. Thus, a large proportion of the decline found by Lahav and Siegelman remains a mystery.