PURSUIT OF JUSTICES: PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS AND THE SELECTION OF SUPREME COURT NOMINEES by David Alistair Yalof. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 296 pp.

Reviewed by Nancy E. Crowe, Department of Government, Dartmouth College.

This book is aptly subtitled; it is a study of how presidents come to nominate individuals to serve as justices on the Supreme Court. It examinesthe politics of how pools of candidates are chosen, and the politics of how presidents opt for some candidates over others. This is not a book that focuses on confirmation battles, rather, the book keeps it focus on "aspects of presidential decisionmaking that occur PRIOR to the formal submission of a nominee's name for Senate consideration" (p. vii). As such, this work provides a needed examination of the selection politics that occur before Senate confirmation politics with which we are all more familiar. Besides the question of how presidents come to choose one candidate over another, the other central question addressed by Yalof is whether presidents are successful in achieving their goals in nominating Supreme Court justices.

These goals are those set by the presidents themselves. The goal of one president may be to place a candidate on the Court who holds a particular ideological position, the goal of another president may be to have a clean confirmation process, and another to repay a political debt. These questions are addressed by an extensive review of the selection process used by every president from Truman to Clinton, with the exception of Carter, who made no Supreme Court nominations. One of the strengths of the book is that it achieves both breadth and depth. The breadth comes from the nine presidential administrations covered. The depth comes from Yalof's extensive use of presidential papers, supplemented by interviews with key figures involved in the nominating process of the various presidential administrations (the information available on the Clinton and Bush administrations is obviously much more limited at this point in time).

Chapter One sets out three sets of factors, which are employed throughout the analysis of the administrations. First, Yalof lists five political-contextual factors that are likely to influence the selection of a particular nominee. These factors are: the timing of the vacancy on the Court (vacancies proximate to elections are likely to result in less controversial nominees), the make-up of the Senate (confirmation battles are more likely to occur when the president's party is in the minority or hold only a slim majority), presidential approval rating (presidents polling well have more latitude to nominate controversial candidates), the outgoing justice himself, and the pool of candidates (pp. 4-5). These last two factors seem not to result in any concrete predictions about the type of nominee that will emerge or whether the president will be successful in achieving his goals.

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The second type of factor that goes into nominee selection and presidential success is the framework a president uses to choose among candidates. Yalof sets out three frameworks: "(1) an "OPEN" selection framework, in which all critical decisions about the next Supreme Court nominee are rendered after a particular vacancy arises; (2) a SINGLE-CANDIDATE FOCUSED framework, in which the identity of the next justice has been decided in advance of a vacancy. (3) a CRITERIA-DRIVEN framework for selection in which - prior to any vacancy arising - the president and his advisors set forth specific criteria to be met by prospective nominees" (p.6). We are told that the "open" framework allows presidents to react when the political environment changes, fostering short-term goals, and that a criteria-driven framework may optimize the president's long-term goals. Other than this, however, the three frameworks do not appear to result in clear predictions that can be tested against the evidence found in the case studies.

Chapter One concludes with a list of ten factors that, since the New Deal, have influenced the politics of presidential nominations to the Court. Most of these factors vary little over the cases studied (for example, the bureaucratization of the White House and Department of Justice, media attention and interest group participation), so while they clearly matter and need to be acknowledged, they are less useful in understanding the different kinds of choices made by Johnson and Reagan, for example.

Chapters Two through Six are the meat of the book; they explore the selection of every Supreme Court nominee (confirmed or not) from the Johnson through the Reagan administrations (the Bush and Clinton administrations are covered in an Epilogue). Here is where Yalof brings his extensive interviewing and archival research to bear. He presents evidence about meetings of the presidents with their advisors and with potential candidates, the names on short and long candidate lists, the criteria used to narrow down lists of candidates, and the goals the presidents sought to achieve. We hear about how lists of candidates are generated, and sometimes ignored. We learn how political promises are kept and broken. We come to understanding how consensus building and infighting among factions within administrations can influence presidential decisions about Supreme Court nominees. The story of each nominee is well told: concise, animated, and attentive to appropriate details.

In these case studies, Yalof discusses the type of framework used by each president, and the consequences of the use that framework for the achievement of presidential goals. At times, however, presidents appear to be evaluated on the basis of goals that they themselves did not seek to attain. For example, in summarizing the Truman Supreme Court nominees, Yalof points out that "Truman's near total domination of the selection process did not translate into the nomination of superlative justices" (p. 39); yet, in contrast to Eisenhower, there is little evidence that appointing the brightest legal minds of the day was one of Truman's objectives. On the whole, however, the assessments of the goals of each president, and the success of a president in meeting those goals, appear to be fair.

Chapter Seven presents a good overview of the plusses and minuses of using each of the frameworks set out in Chapter One. Since Chapter One sets out so many different types of factors (five factors about the larger political context in which nominees are chosen, three frameworks

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employed by presidents to select nominees, and ten general factors influencing recruitment), it can be difficult for the reader to know what to watch for while reading the case studies. Chapter Seven makes the relative importance clear - the choice of the framework by the president is crucial to which nominee will be chosen, and how. Even so, there are no concrete consequences of any of the frameworks, it all depends on how they are used. A criterion driven framework, for example, may allow for flexibility, but only if the criteria are not so restrictive that they restrict the pool of potential nominees too severely. This limits the predictive value of the frameworks. The discussion of how various presidents used each of the frameworks also could have been more systematic. Although this section of the chapter appropriately recounts which presidents employed the framework under discussion, the chapter could have done more to compare one president to another, something that was limited by the chronological organization of the case studies.

The book does raise many interesting questions for future research, and this in itself is a contribution. For example, we may want to know if one framework is better suited to achieving some types of goals than others. Or, after more time has passed, we might want to look into whether the advantages and disadvantages of different frameworks have change appreciably in the aftermath of the Bork nomination.

The merits of the book should not be downplayed. It is a thorough examination of the behind the scenes decisions and politics that go into Supreme Court nominations. Yalof has carefully gathered and succinctly pulled together a wealth of information about the selection of Supreme Court nominees. The result is that we know a great deal more about how presidents come to nominate justices to the Supreme Court than we did before.