When and how often are congressional statutes reviewed and decided in court? Although the U.S. judiciary was designed to exercise no policymaking role, numerous cas studies and historical analyses make clear that at least since the 1960s and 1970s, the courts have been intervening with significant impact in both social policies and regulatory issues. Because so little systematic research has been done in this critically important area, this doctoral dissertation research project promises to enhance our understanding of the topic. A number of competing arguments as to why congressional statutes land in the courts for review have been offered up. The failure of Congress to sufficiently define, specify, clarify, and resolve potential issues of conflict and dispute in public laws for implementation purposes will be the particular focus of this research. Other arguments will be assessed as well, including issue complexity, implementation failure, interest group opportunism, public litigiousness, and judicial activism. Using quantitative methods, including maximum likelihood techniques, this study reviews the statutes produced by Congress in the post-World War II era and traces subsequent court action on those same statutes. Specifically, focusing on a randomly selected sample of statutes signed into law from 1949 to the mid-1980s, this project will 1) examine the nature of the statutes themselves; 2) track how many of these statutes are challenged in which courts; 3) identify what factors appear to determine whether or not and to what extent any particular statute is subject to court review; and, 4) analyze change in the nature of statutes and in the factors that appear to have pushed some statutes into the courts for review across the thirty six year period under investigation.
