Analyzing the Reliability of Supreme Court Justices’ Agenda Setting Records

appreciate the tireless assistance of the reference librarians in the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress. Nearly all aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision making process occur out-side the public eye. To study how the Court makes law and policy, scholars largely must rely upon archival materials harvested from the private papers of retired Supreme Court justices. Previous efforts to validate the reliability of these materials focus solely on the votes justices cast at the merits stage and were unable to assess the reliability of the most recent slew of papers. We ex-amine the agenda setting records for several justices ’ papers, including those of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the justice whose papers were most recently made public. Our results suggest that Blackmun’s papers are reliable and accurately archive his colleagues ’ agenda votes. In March of 2004, the Library of Congress publicly released the private papers of former Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Consisting of 1585 boxes of material, the Blackmu