Litigants, amicus briefs, and lower-court experience jointly shape the content of Supreme Court remedies.

Evidence

In formulating new judicial policies, judges may rely on counsel for the contending parties or on amicus curiae briefs for guidance. Thus, both Thurgood Marshall for the NAACP and the attorneys for the Southern states influenced the desegregation guidelines established in Brown II. Judges may also borrow from the experience of other courts that have addressed similar problems in the past. The Supreme Court drew on the rulings of appeals courts in clarifying the meaning of desegregation and the experience of district courts in determining measures that might be taken to implement Brown. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3178

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the course’s emphasis on legal actors beyond judges — advocates, interest groups, and lower courts as policy suppliers.
• SEED: Article angle: the Supreme Court as a borrower of policy — how the justices synthesize remedies out of adversarial briefs and lower-court experiments rather than inventing them.