Bradley C. Canon

Research Statement

The completion of the second edition of my book (co-authored with Charles Johnson), JUDICIAL POLICIES: IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT (Washington: CQ Press, 1999) dominated my research agenda this biennium. We began in the fall of 1996 and completed the manuscript in July, 1998. The book was published in September of 1998. It is a comprehensive review of the literature in the judicial impact and implementation subfield. The first edition came out in 1984, so there was a lot of new literature to collate and synthesize. Two chapters were reorganized. The first edition sold about 7,500 copies and we expect a similar amount this time.

Early in 1998, I began a joint project with Professor Marcia Whicker (Rutgers) and her graduate student, Michele Collins, to assess the impact of state institutional decisions on state policies. They are interested in state executives and legislatures; my interest is in the state judiciary. We produced two papers given at the Western and Midwestern political science meetings in 1998. My contribution to the former was minor, but I gathered much of the data and primarily wrote the latter, "Variations in State Supreme Court Power: Linkages and Impact," which compared the formal powers and actual policy impact of state supreme courts with that of state legislatures, governors and administrators. We had planned to write a book on comparative institutional contributions to state policies that would be largely quantitative in focus. Unfortunately, Prof. Whicker, discovered she had breast cancer in the summer of 1998 and died in March, 1999, so the project's future is uncertain.

I published "The Supreme Court and Policy Reform: The Hollow Hope Revisited" in the spring 1998 in David Schultz's 1998 book, LEVERAGING THE LAW (N.Y.: Peter Lang Publishers, 1998).

I have collected case study data on four important legal issues that the U.S. Supreme Court decline to hear. (My more ambitious project concerning the impact of the Court's declining to consider important legal questions was turned down by the NSF in the previous biennium.) I plan to use the case study data to write a scholarly article of modest dimensions next summer.