The Gay 90s?: Models of Legal Decision‐Making, Change and History 1

Using legal rulings on gay marriages from two periods in the U.S., I analyze the ability of dominant approaches to legal decision‐making to explain the rulings, their content, and changes from one period to the next. I show that no single dominant approach can address all three concerns. Instead, an approach that blends existing “attitudinal” and new institutionalist models within a structuration framework is developed and defended. In addition to contributing to a specific debate about legal decision‐making, the paper compares the power of cross‐sectional models to more temporally sensitive approaches and develops on Sewell's (1992) structuration theory.