Information, oral arguments, and Supreme Court decision making

Conventional wisdom injudicial politics is that oral arguments play little if any role in how the Supreme Court makes decisions. A primary reason for this view is that insufficient evidence exists to test this hypothesis. Thu s, I ask, do Supreme Court justices use information from oral arguments tha t may help them make decisions as close as possible to their preferred goal s? My answer is straightforward: An investigation of the oral arguments and the Court's majority opinions in a sample of cases from the Burger Court e ra shows that the Court gathers information during oral arguments and then uses this information when making substantive policy choices. This finding has clear implications for the way in which scholars view the Supreme Court 's decisionmaking process, as it suggests that the accepted view of where o ral arguments fit into this process is far from accurate.