The expanding public policy role of high courts heightens concerns over whether societal and political inequalities affect the outcomes of litigation. However, comparative research on this question is limited. This article assesses whether status inequalities between parties and differences in the experience and resources of attorneys influence the selection of cases for judicial review in the Supreme Court of Canada. A series of statistical models reveal that governments are more likely than other parties to influence whether leave is granted but that the experience and resources of lawyers, unlike in the United States, have little impact. The decentralized, low volume and high access features of the Canadian process may explain this finding.

Comparative research of agenda setting by high courts in other countries that replicates American research on the certiorari process is rare. This is the first study of the leave to appeal process in the Supreme Court of Canada. It also is the first multivariate model that operationalizes the jurisprudential indicia Perry identified as important when the U.S. Supreme Court “decides to decide.” This study finds that endogenous institutional norms in Canada produce a decentralized process in which legal cues or signals are emphasized but in diverse and varied ways. Institutional differences across high courts therefore affect the generalizability of American findings.

Institutional change in America's trial courts is poorly understood. Herbert Jacob in his 1982 presidential address to the Law and Society Association recommended that future research might consider intensive studies of single courts over time to trace the causal links between the courts and sociopolitical events outside the courtrooms. This essay explores Jacob's recommendation but ultimately takes a different tack. Instead of conducting natural histories of particular trial courts, this essay speculates that trial courts can be viewed as contested terrains made up of various sites. Proponents of particular ideas, interests, and institutions struggle to impose their policy preferences on these sites. These disputes, which wax and wane over time, constitute the regime politics that shape the probabilities of who wins in America's trial courts. The outlines of this perspective are sketched using the political science literature on agenda politics and on how policy ideas become institutionalized. Illustrations of this perspective are drawn from studies of civil and criminal court reforms.

In this study, relations between criminal defense lawyers and their clients are explored from the attorneys' perspective using interviews with 155 defense counsel from nine felony trial courts. Attorneys claim public clients are more skeptical and less willing to accept their professional authority than private clients and that they need to take extra steps to gain their cooperation. The accountability of attorneys is investigated in relationship to the need to establish “client control.” This problem is resolved through a gamelike situation leading to the apparent paradox that attorneys share decision-making power with public clients contrary to their expectations.

This article uses a variety of multilevel data collected from a nine-county study of felony courts to examine the joint effects of contextual and individual level (sociopolitical characteristics of decision workers) upon decisions made in face-to-face groups. The research finds that although the sociopolitical characteristics of decision makers (attitudes toward punishment, Machiavellianism, and operating styles) made a difference in the outcome of interactions, their role could not be accessed independent of the contextual factors surrounding the interactions. Some of the most important contextual factors were the kind of criminal case being handled, prosecutor office policies restricting discretion, and the configuration of attributes in the group handling the case. Although the data are wholly derived from the criminal court setting, the implications of the findings for studying decision making in other face-to-face groups are developed.

This study of bail reform in a large urban court employs an interrupted time-series research design spanning a six-year period, and examines case data for over 38,000 defendants. Two reforms—creation of a pretrial release agency and adoption of deposit bail—are evaluated to determine whether they had statistically significant impacts on the likelihood of pretrial release, the probability of financial losses for defendants, and the avoidance of bondsmen in the pretrial process. Weighted regression analysis was used to compensate for the possibility of autocorrelation in the time-series data. The reforms proved a mixed success. Explanations for these findings emphasize the role of previous policy patterns and procedural rules in restraining the scope of bail reform and the political forces encouraging the use of bail for preventive detention.