The Legal Advocacy Network

While prior work provides a good deal of information on the aggregate patterns of organized interest involvement at the Supreme Court and the individual-level decisions to file amicus briefs, we know little about the structure of the large, diverse community of interests that lobby the Court. This paper presents an initial effort to apply the concepts and tools of social network analysis to better identify, describe, and understand this structure, which I term the legal advocacy network. I first define, measure, and illustrate the advocacy network at the Supreme Court from the 1953 to 2006 terms. I then turn, in order, to discussing, and in places tentatively demonstrating, how these network data can be fruitfully used to gain leverage on 1) individual interests, 2) the organized interest community, and 3) important characteristics of Supreme Court cases. 1 One of the defining features of the modern U.S. Supreme Court is the heavy involvement of organized interests, typically through the filing of amicus curiae briefs (i.e., third party “friend of the Court ” briefs). By filing these briefs, interests “lobby ” the Court in an effort to influence the legal policy established by this key governmental institution (Barker 1967). While there is still some debate regarding the causal effect these briefs have on the Court’s decisions on th