Legal rule creation in the United States Supreme Court: Judicial administration of antitrust enforcement

The direct goals of this work are twofold. First, I have sought to produce a picture of antitrust policy change in the Supreme Court. Second, I endeavor to analyze the responsiveness of the Supreme Court's pattern of legal policy production to the cases it hears and the policy outputs of the judiciary hierarchy which it heads.; The Supreme Court administers public policies through its own decisions and through its management of the activities of the federal appeals and district courts. Federal regulation of the economy through punishment and deterrence relies particularly on the production and application of rules distinguishing legal and illegal behavior that trial courts, agencies, and market actors can observe and follow. In an attempt to broaden our understanding of the economic policymaking of the justices, my research analyzes the manner in which the Court decides antitrust regulation cases. Using a multilevel approach, I seek to explain the outcomes of antitrust cases as a function of the legal claims and conclusions made by litigants and judges. I examine changes in the Court's treatment of these elements over the last several decades due to the ideological shift from the Warren to the Rehnquist Courts and interpret those changes as signals of shifting priorities in the administration of policy within the issue area. My results suggest substantial variability in the Court's treatment of legal claims and facts over time, along with observable efforts to establish a stable, comprehensible anticompetition policy.; The second part of the dissertation examines the Court's selection and disposition of cases, with data that relate not just to the facts of the cases themselves but also to the policies being generated in the lower federal courts. The difference between a Supreme Court that responds to case qualities and a Court that responds to outputs of its subordinates and aggregate policy outcomes sheds light, I believe, on the difference between the principled, legal body depicted by post-positive scholars of the new legalist persuasion and the political, policy motivated agency described by political jurisprudence. I discover mild evidence of an impact of lower court outcomes on Supreme Court choices, but considerably more evidence of the impact that litigant appeals decisions, especially the prosecutorial and appeals decisions of the United States on the cases from which the justices can choose as vehicles for their policy statements.