In this book, Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch bring together an impressive group of scholars to present essays on how the theoretical tenets of the American political development (or APD) research agenda can help illuminate the behavior and institutional trajectory of the U.S. Supreme Court over time. At the same time, these authors discuss at length the role that the Supreme Court plays in the continuing development of the APD enterprise and the ways in which the American state has evolved. This volume provides a useful contribution, as the APD literature has typically focused on the presidency and bureaucracy (specifically, executive agencies), and more recently on Congress, as the key players in the development of the American state, with “parties and courts” representing the historical antecedents. By focusing specifically on the Supreme Court, Kahn and Kersch place it in a starring role in American legal development, and American political development more generally.

Kahn and Kersch provide a useful background essay on the scholarly Courts literature over the last half century, which helps to place the APD research agenda in historical context. As they discuss, the APD literature is a product of the historical institutionalism movement, which first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (principally in the comparative literature), applied to the American case. This movement occurred in response to the perceived narrowness of behavioralism, which had come to dominate the Courts field at the time. APD scholars argued that a broader and more nuanced view of the Supreme Court was necessary in order to understand how the Court's decision-making context had evolved over time. This more macro view, which encompasses the path dependence, timing, and sequence of political decisions in a temporally fluid political environment with multiple actors, was a stark contrast to the purely preference-based tenets of the behavioral (or attitudinal) tradition in the Supreme Courts literature. Since then, the APD community, broadly and specifically in terms of Courts scholars, has grown considerably.

The volume's essays are all case specific in nature, and are divided into subsections based on their overriding themes. The first section includes essays by Mark A. Graber and Ronald Kahn, which investigate the causal attributes of decision making on the Court by focusing on both internal factors (legal precedent and interpretation, as well as the policy preferences of the justices) and external factors (societal demands and pressures, and interest group preferences). The second section presents essays by Mark Tushnet, Howard Gillman, and Ken I. Kersch, which focus on the Court's effect on the more general political order in twentieth-century American society. The third section includes essays by Wayne D. Moore and Pamela Brandwein, which trace the emergence of authoritative constitutional interpretations at various points in the Court's history (specifically in the rulings in the Slaughter-House cases and the Civil Rights cases). The fourth section presents essays by Julie Novkov, Carol Nackenoff, and Thomas M. Keck, which examine how marginalized groups in society (like interracial couples, Native Americans, and racial minorities generally) gain inclusion in the American constitutional order.

Overall, The Supreme Court and American Political Development is an interesting and important volume. The essays are first rate and hang together well. The latter achievement is accomplished through the careful editing, comprehensive introduction, and concluding synthesis of Kahn and Kersch. Any serious students of APD or the Supreme Court will want to have this volume in their personal collection.

I do, however, want to raise one issue, which is both specific to the present volume and broader in nature. This involves the direction of political inquiry in the Courts literature and the larger political science literature. Too often, different approaches run parallel to each other in pursuit of similar answers. Here, Kahn and Kersch note that APD approaches to the Supreme Court have often been marginalized by those working within the behavioral tradition. Criticisms have been raised that such APD work is anachronistic or unscientific. Such criticisms are unfortunate, as they do not seek to engage the APD literature on its own terms. While decrying such criticisms, Kahn and Kersch at the same time pursue a similar approach. First, they claim that rational choice–based analyses of Courts (works within the “new institutionalism” paradigm) are merely supplements to the basic behavioralism approach. This is a clear mischaracterization of the new institutionalism. Second, the authors claim that historical institutionalism (which underlies APD work) provides a more useful approach to study institutional change, since the new institutionalism is static (a “snapshot model”) and thus cannot account for political dynamics or trends (p. 15). This assertion that new institutionalist scholarship does not focus on (and cannot account for) institutional change is patently incorrect. Finally, rather than seek to promote merit in different approaches, the authors follow the dismissive approach they ascribe to the behavioralists by claiming that “APD agendas are often more interesting and more engaged with questions that truly matter, than much of the work that is done today within the mainstream of the contemporary study of American politics” (p. 24). Such a brash claim is both disappointing and unnecessary.

In raising this issue, and critiquing Kahn and Kersch as I have done, I seek to promote a more collective scholarly enterprise. There is much that historical institutionalists (APD scholars) can learn from new institutionalists, and vice versa. Both sets of scholars are, after all, interested in institutions, and the effects that institutions have on political decisions and outcomes. They come at questions from different perspectives—historical institutionalists work within the sociological tradition and focus on the macro level, while new institutionalists work within the economics tradition and focus on the micro level—and in reality should complement each other, not endeavor to be substitutes for each other. The different levels of analysis can be integrated into a more general and comprehensive approach to political inquiry. A recent book that makes strides in this direction is Preferences and Institutions: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (2005), edited by Ira Katznelson (an historical institutionalist) and Barry R. Weingast (a new institutionalist). My hope is that such intersections between different theoretical camps and traditions will become more common, so that we can learn from each other and advance more expeditiously as a scholarly community.