Well, yes and no. One can argue that individuals join groups because of what they do, not to tell them what to do. Koshner here offers some useful evidence, drawn from personal interviews, that groups file briefs to satisfy organizational needs, with policy goals only a secondary factor. But then the discussion begins to slide when Koshner speculates that the reason the major Jewish organizations did not participate in a major 1993 equal access case was because membership was undecided or conflicted about which side to support. For some research I was doing on a related topic, I sat in on several meetings in which two of the organizations Koshner identifies were discussing their litigation agenda.
Resource allocation is a major issue for most public interest law organizations.
How those resources are allocated is often a function, as Koshner points out elsewhere, of what the Court chooses to decide, not of membership demands. Another quick word here about the role of membership in the group's decision making process. When Koshner describes the 61 organizations in his study as groups that litigate, he assumes, or so it appears, that they all give equal consideration to the decision to participate in litigation. That's not quite the case. A group that decides to sign a brief prepared by someone else may be doing nothing more than offering an endorsement of a legal position.