Dr. H. W. Perry, Jr., a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at UT-Austin who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Law visited Texas State on October 7th to deliver a Discourse in Democracy lecture.
Entitled “Deciding to Decide: How the U.S. Supreme Court Selects Its Cases,” his lecture explored how the U.S. Supreme Court selects the roughly 75-80 cases it chooses to hear each year from the tens of thousands of appeals that it receives each year. His lecture drew on his book Deciding to Decide: Agenda Setting in the United States Supreme Court. This volume has won many awards including the Wilson Prize of the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press, the Pritchett Award for the best book in Public Law from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. The lecture was attended by more than 400 students and faculty members. The lecture was followed by questions and discussion, after which students huddled around Professor Perry to extend the conversation for almost an hour.
Prior to the lecture, Dr. Perry presided at a seminar for two dozen political science undergraduate and graduate majors and faculty members, as well as a dinner at Palmer’s attended by eight political science undergraduate students. The seminar focused on the “The Elitification of the U.S. Supreme Court” and explored how most cases before the Supreme Court are argued by an increasingly small pool of appellate lawyers who mostly have Ivy League educations and have clerked for former justices.
