Thomas J. Brennan (Northwestern), Lee Epstein (Northwestern) & Nancy C. Staudt (Northwestern) have published The Political Economy of Judging, 93 Minn. L. Rev. 1503 (2009).  Here is the Conclusion:

Scholars and commentators have long argued that Supreme Court Justices seek to advance legal and political goals in the decision-making process, but for just as long have ignored the role the macroeconomy may play in disputes involving economic regulation. We sought to fill this gap by considering the effect of variables designed to tap the state of the macroeconomy—economic cycles, inflation, employment, GDP, consumer confidence, and expectations as to consumer prices— even after controlling for the political composition of the Court. Advancing an economic theory of the Court that hypothesized heightened levels of teamwork, we expected to find that that the Justices would desire to cooperate with the other branches of government in recessionary times in order to promote national economic goals. Accordingly, we suspected they would be more likely to defer to the United States in periods of economic crisis.

We were wrong. As it turns out, the government is less likely to prevail in times of recession and more likely to triumph in times of relative prosperity. A 1% increase in employment rates leads to a 13% increase in the government’s win rate, and all the other economic variables, while not statistically significant, show a similar trend. To explain these findings we offer a signaling conjecture: the Justices will interpret economic downturns as signals that the federal policymakers are incompetently managing the economy, and thus will decrease their deference to the Solicitor General when the economy sours.

We propose to test this conjecture in future studies, but for now it is the larger point that should not be missed: without consideration of business cycles at least in the area of economic regulation, the extant literature on judicial decision making is incomplete and in need of revision.