A rapidly burgeoning literature in judicial politics concerns the variation in elements of writing style such as reading difficulty, cognitive complexity, affective language, and informality in judicial opinions. Some of these studies argue that judges strategically alter their writing style in anticipation of reactions from other actors. Others indicate that writing style is a function of judge characteristics as well as case-related factors. We investigate the correlates of writing style in US Circuit Courts of Appeals by analyzing a stratified random sample consisting of 11,771 opinions. Construing style broadly to encompass several dimensions suggested by prior work, we find that case and judge characteristics explain substantially more variance in writing style than do strategic considerations.

We argue that given finite resources to review the large number of lower court decisions, Supreme Court justices should primarily be interested in aggregate responses to their precedents. We offer a theory in which the US Supreme Court drives aggregate responses to its decisions by signaling the utility of its precedents to judges on the lower courts. Specifically, we argue that lower court judges have a greater propensity to rely on a Supreme Court decision when the justices explicitly direct a lower court to consider a formally argued decision in its summary decisions. Our results demonstrate that such signals significantly increase the frequency with which the lower courts adopt the precedents of the US Supreme Court. We corroborate the causality of these links through qualitative analyses, distance matching methods, and simultaneous sensitivity analysis. Our study offers new and important insights on judicial impact and decision-making behavior in the American courts.

We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements increase awareness more generally, especially in cases of moderate salience. In contrast, for a very high salience case, awareness is high before and after the decision is announced, while, for a case fabricated by the investigators, “awareness” is not affected by the Court’s activities. The results suggest that while the public may eventually respond to the behavior of national institutions, this response is likely first filtered through an elite subset of the population.

At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data support. The data suggest that circuit court judges may change along with society but also that they follow public opinion because they care about their reputations in their home states.

Sectors of the criminal justice system have bureaucratized to such an extent that their management has supplanted the values for which they were created. Weber predicted this phenomenon, arguing that substantive rationality would be replaced by formal rationality as organizations grew. We test the relationship between size and these two types of rationality with the use of judicial performance checks in arraignments created from conversations with administrative courthouse staff and pilot observations at courthouses. We measure judicial performance through arraignment checklists (n = 481). Findings from multilevel models suggest that there is a positive relationship between size and formal rationality and a negative relationship between size and substantive rationality, even when controlling for workload by research design. Results suggest that abundance of formal rationality or substantive rationality facilitates injustice. These results begin a discourse encouraging quantitatively measuring formal and substantive rationality and that size be considered regarding judicial administrative policy.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of timing in political decision making. In this article, I consider the potential for the strategic timing of court decisions involving the constitutional review of statutes. As courts lack the ability to directly implement their decisions, scholars have identified an attentive public as invaluable for judicial authority. Building on this literature, I argue that the proximity of a national election increases awareness and thereby creates an environment conducive to the assertive exercise of constitutional review. I then present evidence of the electoral cycle’s effect on decision making at the German Federal Constitutional Court.

What explains expansions to the federal judiciary? Whereas existing research focuses on unified government as an explanation, we argue ideological proximity between institutions involved in the expansion process more accurately predicts judicial expansions. We examine whether Congress chose to add seats to each federal district or circuit court annually from 1937 to 2012 and find expansions are more likely when (1) the ideological distance between chambers of Congress is smaller and (2) the ideological distance between Congress and individual district or circuit courts is greater. These findings suggest the administration of federal courts is influenced by the political concerns in another branch of government, raising important questions about judicial independence.

Judicial politics scholars routinely posit that the behavior of Supreme Court justices is motivated in important part by concerns of institutional maintenance, that is, by a desire to maintain the Court’s unusually large store of institutional legitimacy. Previous work on this topic, however, has focused almost exclusively on the influence of such motivation on judicial decision making. We contend that if institutional maintenance is an important goal, it should be observable in other contexts as well. We examine televised mass-media interviews with Supreme Court justices from 1998 to 2016 and find that legitimacy reinforcement is the predominant goal reflected in justices’ rhetoric in those interviews.

The opinions of the US Supreme Court are central to volumes of research on law, courts, and politics. To understand these complex and often-lengthy documents, scholars frequently rely on dichotomous indicators of opinion content. While sometimes appropriate, for many research settings this simplification of opinion content systematically omits important information. Using all US Supreme Court opinions from 1803 to 2010 in association with structural topic models, I instead demonstrate the value of representing the Court’s attention in opinions in terms of topic proportions.

Political scientists interested in the structure of legal doctrine are especially attuned to the impact of the judicial hierarchy. They generally frame the issue as whether a higher court will issue a rigid “rule” to prevent shirking or a vague “standard” to give more discretion to lower courts. This “rules versus standards” debate rests on two presumptions: jurists write doctrine, and doctrine varies in flexibility. Using the US Supreme Court, I offer an initial empirical evaluation of these presumptions. The findings reveal that the justices almost always adopt doctrine suggested to them and that these doctrines differ little in flexibility.

Some studies examining the effect of court decisions on public opinion examine their legitimacy-conferring role or ability to cause the public to accept specific policies. Others examine when courts act as a “republican schoolmaster” and change substantive policy attitudes. Using two studies, this article shows that these two effects are driven by different processes and caused by a different form of support. Legitimacy perceptions or diffuse support drives the process that causes people to accept specific policies. The process that changes a person’s substantive policy stance is driven by a person’s evaluation of the court’s previous policy decisions or specific support.

Recent scholarship suggests that Supreme Court decision making is significantly constrained by Congress and the public, often arguing that case salience is a key factor in the operation of these constraints. However, scholars have developed different theoretical expectations regarding the effects of case salience on justices and have found empirical support for mutually contradictory theories. Furthermore, these studies rely on an endogenous measure of case salience. I replicate two leading studies using a theoretically appropriate measure of case salience in order to shed new light on this important topic, finding evidence of constraint from the public in salient cases.

Analysis of Republican Party of Minnesota v. White by political scientists shows that White had no appreciable effect on the conduct or outcome of judicial elections, including a comprehensive study of White by Chris W. Bonneau, Melinda Gann Hall, and Matthew J. Streb. Yet there is reason to believe that White may have had a more narrow impact than Bonneau, Hall, and Streb originally allowed. An extension of their original analysis is conducted, with results showing that their findings are largely robust to more tailored model specifications. Exceptions include findings on ballot roll-off, but contradictory results further support the notion that White truly had no effect.