The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

particularly as reflected in the ideology of the appointing authority, explain 

judicial outcomes. Judicial voting behavior in the United States, it is said, is 

best explained by sincere judicial policy preferences and these will get chan-

neled in the opinions of individual justices.

21

 A “strategic” model, by contrast, 

understands judges as rational actors who pursue strategies in order to attain 

their preferred outcomes, but these are constrained by their institutional inter-

dependence.

22

 While fidelity to law matters, the response that judges elicit 

from the institutional environment within which they operate better explains 

outcomes.

23

 We should understand strategic decision-making as constrained 

by law’s imagined possibilities, but departing from traditional methods of judi-

cial decision-making.

Though these two models originated simultaneously as a way of under-

standing the US Supreme Court output,

24

 they have been conscripted 

as techniques with which to study foreign court behavior,

25

 including the 

Supreme Court of Canada. The attitudinal model, however, has not been 

a helpful explanatory device of Canadian developments. In contrast to the 

United States, Alarie and Green find that there is “not at all a strong rela-

tionship between the party of the prime minister who appointed the judges 

and their subsequent voting preferences.”

26

 Not only is there a weak connec-

tion between purported policy preference and voting outcomes, Canadian 

Supreme Court justices are likely to agree more often in divisive cases than 

their United States counterparts and, when they do disagree, voting patterns 

21 

Jeffrey A  Segal and Harold J  Spaeth,  The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model  

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 32–3.

22 

Lee Epstein and Jack Knight, The Choices Justices Make (Washington, D.C.:Congressional 

Quarterly Press, 1998) 12; Lee Epstein and Jack Knight, “Toward a Strategic Revolution in 

Judicial Politics: A Look Back, a Look Ahead” (2000) Political Research Quarterly 625, 626.

23 

Walter F. Murphy, Elements of Judicial Strategy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 

1964) 199. There is a third institutionalist approach that looks to the constraining influence 

of institutional norms and path dependence to explain judicial behavior. Here legal norms 

play a role in addition to institutional settings in which judges operate. See e.g., Rogers M. 

Smith, “Historical Institutionalism and the Study of Law” in Gregory A. Caldeira, R. Daniel 

Keleman and Keith E. Whittington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2008) and Nancy Maveety, “The Study of Judicial Behavior and the 

Discipline of Political Science” in Nancy  Maveety (ed.), The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior 

(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 28–9. This account is not taken up here.

24 

Maveety, The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior, 25.

25 

Pablo T. Spiller and Rafael Gely, “Strategic Judicial Decision-Making” in Gregory A. Caldeira,  

R. Daniel Keleman and Keith E. Whittington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 38–9.

26 

Benjamin Alarie and Andrew Green, “Policy Preference Change and Appointments to the 

Supreme Court of Canada” (2009) 47 Osgoode Hall LJ 1, 28.

---

522