Congressional Control or Judicial Independence: The Determinants of U.S. Supreme Court Labor-Relations Decisions, 1949-1988

This paper extends the approach to Congressional and regulatory institutions developed by Shepsle and Weingast by introducing an ideologically motivated Judiciary.The model yields empirically refutable implications which are then tested in the framework of modeling the Court's industrial labor relations decisions.Using information on politicians' ADA scores, the composition of the Court, and the decisions of the Court, we obtain estimates of a) the position of the Court in relation to the relevant members of Congress, and b) the determinants of labor policy through the years.We find, first, that the Court was constrained by Congress over at least half of the period.