ELSEVIER A Contractual Model of the Voting Behavior of the Supreme Court: The Role of the Chief Justice EUC, ENIAF. TOMA University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky Political scientists have long debated the role of the Supreme Court in public poli- cymaking. Much of the debate has centered around the issue of judicial independence from political factors. Despite a rather extensive debate in the literature, the question of independence has rarely been subjected to systematic testing. This paper examines the role of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in linking decisions of the Court to the desires of Congress. Specifically, the paper focuses on the role of the Supreme Court Chief Justice as an agent of Congress that reacts to budgetary signals sent by the Congress. The resulting relationship between budgets allocated to the Court and de- cisions reached by the Court are analyzed from 1946 to 1988. © 1996 by Elsevier Science Inc. I. Introduction An important contribution of economic models in recent years has been to demonstrate that predictions derived from the assumption of individual utility maximization are largely consistent with the outcomes and policies of political organizations. Predictable implications about policy outcomes and policy tools employed by various agencies have been tested for legislative bodies, bureaucratic agencies, and more recently, for the judiciary. Examples of some of the early economic models of judicial behavior are the works of Landes and Posner (1975) and Higgins and Rubin (1980), in which judicial nullifications and reversals were examined from a utility-maximizing perspective. More recently, Epstein (1990), Toma (1991), Cohen (1992), Gely and Spiller (1992), and Posner (1994) have examined incentives confronting the judiciary. The Toma (1991) paper focused on a particular institutional aspect of the relation- ship between the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress appropriates an annual budget to the Supreme Court just as it does the other agencies in the federal government. Toma provided evidence to support the hypothesis that Congress uses the The author wishes to thank John Garen, Mark Toma, participants at the applied microeconomics workshop, at the Law School of the University of Kentucky, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. International Review of Law and Economics 16:433-447, 1996 © 1996 by Elsevier Science Inc. 0144-8188/96/$15.00 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 PI1 S0144-8188(96)00036-1