POLI 343 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Strongest
16 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
The last part in understanding judicial decision-making, is to think of it from a strategic choice model, which we"ve already encountered a couple times already. The strategic choice model is not unlike personal preferences in the sense that its still a rational choice model. So we"re still talking about goals, and cost-benefit analysis, but this time it"s not ideologically driven. Scholars of this approach think that judges are looking for the most effective and efficient way of realizing their goals. Here scholars are not so much interested in what motivates these goals, but rather the process by which judges engage in strategic action, how they go about trying to realize their goals. The argument here looks a lot at the effect of institutions. Institutions can be defined in a number of different ways, but for the purposes of our argument, can be seen as a system of rules and practices.
