A Tangled Tale: Studying State Supreme Courts

No part of the history of U.S. courts presents such a tangle of detail as does the handling of appeals. Nor does the tangled story unwind toward a happy solution. James Willard Hurst, The Growth of the Law: The Law Makers (1950:101) Writing in 1950, Hurst (1950: 183) noted that there was far more opinion on the function of courts than actual knowledge of their work. Thirty years later his assessment was only slightly more encouraging, but he noted at least some positive developments. Among them was “a substantial increase in ordered collection and assessment of facts about the flow of court business” (1980–81: 407), some of which tried to cover broad areas of the country and reached back into the nineteenth century. Much of this came from a number of longitudinal studies of court business the findings of which began appearing in publications in the mid-1970s. These were ambitious, pioneering, and often theoretically challenging studies that have spawned a thriving subfield in both the United States and Europe. One of these works is a sixteen-state study of supreme courts covering the years 1870 to 1970, conducted by Robert A. Kagan, Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, and Stanton Wheeler. My purpose here is to provide an overview of the seven articles reporting on this study that appeared between 1975 and 1987, and to provide a critical review of the four central articles in the series.