Just leave it to the courts: How, when, and why Congress abdicates the legislative power

What happens to a bill once signed into law? While many details of the legislative process have been subject to exhaustive study, scholars of American politics have done surprisingly little systematic tracking of statutes beyond enactment. This study focuses on one very common fate of statutes: the processes by which statutes are pushed into the courts for review and interpretation.;Using quantitative methods, this study reviews the statutes produced by Congress across the 28-year period spanning the 86th through 99th Congresses (1959-86) and traces subsequent court action on those same statutes. Specifically, focusing on a randomly-selected sample of statutes, this study (1) tracks how many of these statutes are challenged in which courts; (2) reviews the types of issues addressed by the courts in interpreting these same statutes; (3) identifies and measures a set of factors that potentially affect whether or not and to what extent any particular statute is subject to court review; and (4) develops and tests a statistical model of statutory interpretation. The statistical analysis of the sample statutes reveals a patterned set of political correlates governing the likelihood that a statute will eventually land in court and the number of court cases that are likely to ensue. In general, the incidence of statutory interpretation appears rooted in the construction of the statute itself, including the nature of the issues written into the statute, the length (or complexity) of the statute, and the direct instructions sent by Congress to the courts in court jurisdiction provisions. Other factors appear to have variable effects on statutory interpretation in different courts, including the legislative history describing the process through which the statute was enacted, the broader political context out of which a statute evolves, and the judicial climate at the time of enactment. These results suggest that choices are being made, choices by members of Congress that often lead to reassignment of responsibility--to bureaucrats and eventually the courts--over the course of public policy.