Amicus Curiae Participation in U.S. Supreme Court Litigation: An Appraisal of Hakman's “Folklore”
- 1 January 1982
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Law & Society Review
- Vol. 16 (2) , 311-320
- https://doi.org/10.2307/3053362
Abstract
In 1969 Nathan Hakman published a report of his investigation of the role of interest groups in Supreme Court litigation. He found that interest groups filed amicus curiae briefs in only 18.6 percent of the 1,175 “noncommercial” cases decided by the Supreme Court between 1928 and 1966. Participation as amicus curiae illustrates only one aspect of litigation activity, and at that one of the most limited, but Hakman took this as a reliable indicator that interest group activity in the courts was less frequent than was commonly supposed. Based on these findings, Hakman attacked the view that amicus participation was a form of political action. Such a view, he argued, was mere “scholarly folklore” (Hakman, 1969: 199).Keywords
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