This volume began as a result of a paper I prepared for a panel at the
annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association that commemorated the work of my dissertation supervisor, Woody Howard.
But the volume would not have taken shape without discussions I had
with Saul Brenner about the reaction to and subsequent empirical testing of Howard’s claims about the phenomenon of judicial ›uidity in
judicial decision making. It is from these discussions, and from Saul’s
careful and critical reading of my conference paper on Howard’s contributions to the study of judicial behavior, that the idea for Pioneers grew