230 ANALYZING DATA
construction to the analysis of institutions. The methods outlined here supply tools for this job.^8
In order to investigate how contestable knowledge claims gain institutional credibility, the
first order of business is to study how competing meanings of documentary data are first built.
For this task, the metaphor of a “frame” is exceptionally useful. A frame refers to a collection of
taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. As described in more detail below, these cognitive
elements shape the way documentary data are ordered and organized, that is, made meaningful.
Studying the reception of knowledge claims is the second order of business, and this requires
linking the study of frames to the study of institutions. Particular knowledge claims must be
connected to particular interpretive communities (a concept discussed below), as well as various
institutional forces and pressures. In order to study the reception of dueling knowledge claims,
this chapter draws from a literature called the sociology of scientific knowledge, or simply sci-
ence studies, as this literature has developed techniques for studying the production and accredi-
tation of knowledge. In adapting the methods of science studies to the study of constitutional law,
I show how we might study the social and institutional settings in which knowledge claims in the
legal academy meet and compete for credibility. With this second set of methods in hand, the
careers of knowledge claims—that is, their trajectories of credibility—become amenable to in-
vestigation. The concept of a career implies action over time, and science studies methods permit
us to relate changing assessments of credibility to changing institutional environments.
These techniques, it should be noted, position researchers to investigate the complex feedback
loops that exist between the legal academy and the Supreme Court. Critically, cross-institutional
dynamics between the legal academy and the Court help give rise to prevailing legal orthodoxies.
Historical and doctrinal orthodoxies hold enormous symbolic power when it comes to the justifi-
cation of Fourteenth Amendment decisions due to the unique institutional “grammar” of legiti-
macy that pertains to the Court. According to this grammar, only certain forms of constitutional
argument are considered legitimate: historical, doctrinal, textual, structural, and prudential (Bobbitt
1982). The methods outlined here position researchers to study how “winning” claims in the legal
academy influence the Court and help give rise to legal orthodoxies about history and doctrine.
We are ultimately dealing, then, with the worlds of both academic law and Supreme Court deci-
sion making.
Indeed, there are connections between the techniques outlined here and the interpretive-historical
approach to Supreme Court decision making that within the public law community is increas-
ingly being called “New Historical Institutionalism” (NHI).^9 In brief, NHI explores how institu-
tional contexts shape judicial decisions. Moving beyond a view of institutions as either facilitating
or impeding the exogenously formed policy preferences of justices (Epstein and Knight 1998),
NHI scholars have developed a conceptualization of legal institutions as “constitutive” in nature
(Brigham 1987; McCann 1994). In one of the founding essays of NHI, Rogers Smith (1988)
argues that legal institutions are independent influences in Court decision making, creating dis-
tinctively “legal” values, perspectives, and rhetorics of justification. The deliberate behavior of
Court justices, Smith explains, becomes understandable only in the context of institutionally con-
stituted purposes and perspectives.
The methods of science studies and frame analysis provide a systematic and empirical way of
investigating this constitutive process “in action.” Indeed, these methods are enormously useful
to the study of constitutional development and cross-institutional impacts on the Court, major
concerns of NHI (Epp 1999; Graber 1991; Kahn and Kersch 2006; Lovell 2003; Novkov 2001).
As NHI seeks to explain constitutional change with reference to shifts in institutionally constituted
purposes and perspectives,^10 a methodological focus on the careers of knowledge claims is espe-