Supreme Court's Agenda By Vanessa A. Baird: Article Analysis

For my second reflection paper for this class, I chose to read and study the article titled “The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda” written by Vanessa A. Baird. Baird writes a well-organized and fact-supported article with the intention of studying what influences the U.S. Supreme Court to hear certain cases while denying others. This was the topic that was chosen to be studied because whatever factor influences the cases the court receives and hears, it also affects the policies being placed on Americans. The author found tons of research regarding this issue and incorporated it into her study. In the end, the author was able to conclude that salient decisions, made by the Supreme Court in certain policy

Baird questions if interest groups have the power to influence litigation patterns, and believes that if they do, the conditions of the situation will determine if they decide to further engage in litigation. I felt that this was something important to note considering the author establishes that litigation essentially creates the agenda of the Supreme Court, in an indirect manner of sort. In other words, litigation and what seems to be viewed as “policy priorities” have a way of creating an agenda based on each other. The author approaches this by implying that litigation seeks the information provided by policy priorities. On the other hand, it seems as if policy priorities are based on the cases brought before the court, which are a result of litigation. In a way, it seems as if there isn’t a way to divide the two from each other. The article provided readers with a lot of information that might not have been well known. Personally, I wasn’t aware of the protentional reasons that cases would and wouldn’t be heard by the Supreme Court. I thought that cases were mostly chosen at random or in the order that was brought before the

Although this article is very informative, it still leaves me with a few questions and ideas on what I believe should stem from this study. My first question would be, why does this matter? What is being influenced by the Supreme Court’s agenda other than policy? This is a question that I don’t feel like this article answered and as I mentioned before, I have limited prior knowledge on this topic and will need to research further. Another question I have is directed towards the author, rather than the information. My question for the author would be, what made you interested in this topic? For our assignment, we are supposed to be determining why this topic is being studied, but I am unclear on the cause. This might be due to my lack of prior knowledge as well, but I didn’t really see anything to answer this question of mine either. One study that I believe has the potential to stem from this study is a study to determine whether the same factors that influence the cases the court hears directly affect the policies being