In Attitudinal Decision Making in the Supreme Court of Canada, C.L. Ostberg and Matthew E. Wetstein provide an extensive overview of judicial behaviour at the high court of Canada. The authors utilize a database of Supreme Court decisions in the areas of criminal law, civil rights and liberties, and economic cases in the period 1984 to 2003. The primary objective of the study is to test the applicability of the attitudinal/ideological model of judicial decision making at the Canadian Supreme Court in the post-Charter era. In other words, do Canadian high court judges decide cases based upon their political and policy preferences, rather than the legal factors present in a particular case? In addition, Ostberg and Wetstein examine the ideological consistency of the justices over time, the effect of gender on judicial opinions, the influence of the Chief Justice's panel assignment power and whether a norm of consensus is present at the Court. Overall, the book presents a wealth of insights, observations, and analyses for the scholar of the Canadian Supreme Court.

The heart of the book is comprised of the chapters in which the authors present the results of their examination of judicial decision making in the areas of criminal procedure, civil rights and liberties, and economic cases. Chapter 4 sets out the results of the judicial decision-making analyses in two types of criminal procedure matters: right to counsel cases and search and seizure cases. In right to counsel cases, the results for the analyses using both the full (unanimous and nonunanimous cases) dataset and the reduced (nonunanimous cases only) dataset indicated that the variable for judicial ideology (derived from content analysis of newspaper commentaries) was highly significant, and displayed an estimated change in probability of .398 (full dataset) and .719 (reduced database). In search and seizure cases, judicial ideology was again highly significant and indicated an estimated change in probability of .245 (full dataset) and .439 (reduced database). Thus, there appears to be quite strong evidence that judges at the Canadian Supreme Court are influenced by ideology when adjudicating criminal procedure cases. In chapter 5, judicial decision making in civil rights and liberties cases is examined in both equality and freedom of speech cases. Here, judicial ideology was not significant as a predictor for judicial voting in either equality or free speech cases. The authors suggest that these findings demonstrate that Canadian high court judges do not follow consistent or conventional ideological voting patterns in civil rights and liberties cases. Chapter 6 presents the test of the attitudinal model in economic disputes, specifically, union and tax cases. As in civil liberties cases, the evidence for attitudinal voting in economic cases is fairly weak. The ideology variable is found to be statistically significant in only one of the four analyses in this chapter: tax cases using the nonunanimous dataset. However, the authors also include a new dummy variable in the model for the union (but not the tax) cases: whether a justice had previous and lengthy experience in the private practice of law. The private practice variable is found to be significant for union cases using both datasets. The authors assert that, “in the union/management area at least, private legal experience serves as a useful surrogate for explaining ideological conflict” (170). In other words, the authors argue, even though the ideology variable is not significant in union cases, the private practice variable does demonstrate that significant attitudinal decision making exists in economic cases at the Canadian high court. However, using the private practice variable as a stand-in for the standard ideology variable is debatable, because, as a dummy variable, it is a relatively crude measure compared to the more elaborate standard ideology variable.

Overall, the question of whether Canadian high court justices tend to adjudicate cases based upon ideological factors is subject to several interpretations. In the conclusion, Ostberg and Wetstein include results using both the standard ideology variable and the private practice variable in their summary table, and state that the results provide “strong evidence that attitudinal decision making is prevalent in the post-Charter Court” (215). If one accepts that the judges' private practice experience is indeed a valid surrogate for judicial ideology, then this conclusion is justified, as statistically significant results were obtained for ideological voting in four of six areas of law. However, if only the standard ideology variable is included in the results, then it is only in the area of criminal procedure (and nonunanimous tax cases) that strong evidence of attitudinal voting is observed at the Court. This interpretation of the data would lead to the conclusion that attitudinal decision making at the Court may be largely limited to criminal law cases. However, this alternative interpretation is not meant to dispute the conclusions in the book; rather, this observation is meant to buttress the authors' claim that ideological voting by Canadian judges may be considerably more complex than previously assumed. Overall, Attitudinal Decision Making in the Supreme Court of Canada offers a number of challenging observations regarding the Canadian Supreme Court, the Canadian judicial process, and the attitudinal model in comparative context. It is required reading for scholars of the Canadian high court, but will present much of interest for general public law scholars.