The idea of authority lies at the conceptual heart of much legal policy analysis. This essay discusses three perspectives on state and legal authority—the liberal‐constitutional, the corporatist, and the technocratic—as a broad political framework for understanding major issues of judicial policy‐making in the United States today. The essay examines recent literature on judicial legitimacy and capacity within the context of the three perspectives and raises research questions which derive from this approach to judicial policy. This framework provides a theoretical basis for seeing not only a decline, but changes in patterns of judicial authority and their relationship to any existing crisis of authority in the state in