Walter F. Murphy: The interactive nature of judicial decision making

Since his days in the Marine Corps, Walter F. Murphy has conceptualized the world in strategic terms. Just as no military commander can expect to win a battle without taking into account the position and likely actions of his opponents, no jurist can expect to establish policy that members of society will respect unless he or she is attentive to the preferences and likely actions of those members. Or so Murphy has argued in now-classic works on the complex strategic situations confronting U.S. Supreme Court justices in their dealings with their colleagues (e.g., Murphy 1964) or with relevant members of the policymaking community (e.g., Murphy 1962b). In this chapter we detail the major role Murphy's scholarship has played in initiating the strategic revolution that is now under way in the field of law and courts (see Cameron 1994; Epstein and Knight 2000). But to focus exclusively on those studies would be to miss Murphy's contributions to so many other areas of inquiry. Accordingly, we devote the first section to an overview of his research, with emphasis on its recent direction. Next, we turn to his work on strategic interactions between the Court and other political organizations and among the justices. We begin with a description of the central studies and then move to the question-puzzle, really-of why several decades elapsed before scholars begin to heed the lessons in those works. We end with a detailed discussion of their impact on contemporary thinking about law, courts, and judges.