We develop a new approach to understanding which legal questions the Supreme Court chooses to address. We show that the Supreme Court is more likely to resolve ideologically polarizing legal questions. This result is based on a new technique for estimating the ideology of a doctrine, which we implement using a dataset of intercircuit splits. We use this technique to identify legal issues that are ideologically polarizing and show they are more likely to be addressed by the Supreme Court than less polarizing issues. Our results demonstrate how the Supreme Court uses certiorari to advance its ideological policymaking goals.

Unethical behavior among US judges, including sexual misconduct and other forms of discriminatory behavior, is becoming increasingly publicized. These controversies are particularly concerning given the important role judges play in shaping policy pertaining to individual rights. We argue that types of misconduct serve as a signal to the public about potential threats judges may pose to people, particularly groups of people who are marginalized. We use a survey experiment that introduces a judge who has engaged in misconduct to measure if the type of misconduct will influence attitudes on whether the judge poses a threat to the rights of women, racial minorities, and ethnic minorities. Interestingly, we find that judges accused of discriminatory misconduct toward one group are viewed as a threat to rights across the board and are seen as less able to rule fairly on matters pertaining to marginalized people more generally.

A growing theoretical literature identifies how the process of constitutional review shapes judicial decision-making, legislative behavior, and even the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions. However, the empirical interrogation of these theoretical arguments is limited by the absence of a common protocol for coding constitutional review decisions across courts and time. We introduce such a coding protocol and database (CompLaw) of rulings by 42 constitutional courts. To illustrate the value of CompLaw, we examine a heretofore untested empirical implication about how review timing relates to rulings of unconstitutionality (Ward and Gabel 2019). First, we conduct a nuanced analysis of rulings by the French Constitutional Council over a 13-year period. We then examine the relationship between review timing and strike rates with a set of national constitutional courts in one year. Our data analysis highlights the benefits and flexibility of the CompLaw coding protocol for scholars of judicial review.

While informal institutions significantly affect the functioning of courts, they also change the powers, position, and influence of individual actors in judicial systems. This Article analyzes how the presence of informal judicial institutions and practices reshapes the influence and importance of roles individual actors play in the functioning of the judiciary. The aim of this Article is three-fold. First, it maps the actors of informal judicial institutions and practices. Second, it stresses the importance of looking at actors who are not formally involved in particular judicial processes and recognized as decision-makers but have the ability to influence the judiciary informally. Third, it shows why it is necessary to keep in mind that also collective bodies can take part in informal judicial institutions and practices.

Though widely used in studies of judicial politics, American Bar Association (ABA) ratings have a partisan bias. As a result, when researchers include ABA ratings and ideology in a model together, the results may be biased toward non-findings with respect to the effect of ideology, qualifications, or both. This study leverages new data on the ABA rating process to create a valid and reliable new measure for the qualifications of nominees to the US Courts of Appeals. In an empirical example, I test the new measure against alternative specifications to demonstrate its potential. The empirical example also presents a new data set on circuit court confirmation hearing speech. The findings contrast with well-established conclusions from previous studies.

Many studies of policy diffusion focus on what factors affect a policy’s adoption. Few studies specifically test the mechanism and two of the most common explanations – learning and emulation – have not been tested outside of legislatures. While judicial scholars have applied policy diffusion to several types of laws, we know little about the motivation behind why policies spread from court to court. One unexplored area is the relationship between courts. This short article analyzes the two mechanisms most likely to affect peer institutions: learning and emulation. Using network analysis methods on an original dataset of state supreme court citations from 1960 to 2010, I provide evidence that courts are learning from and not emulating each other, but the mechanism is policy-specific.

We investigate the American public's attitudes over an integral component of judicial behavior: the legal principles judges employ when making decisions. Our theoretical perspective argues that political preferences shape individuals’ attitudes over how judges apply legal principles, mirroring ideological divisions expressed by political elites and judges. Using an original battery of questions, we find high support across all Americans for the use of certain, well-established legal principles, but stark differences in how liberals and conservatives evaluate the use of more controversial principles. In a survey experiment, we find that agreement (disagreement) between an individual's attitudes over the use of legal principles and the reasoning contained in a Supreme Court opinion is associated with increased (decreased) support for the Court decision.

Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical horizontal accountability function, but they can also play a role in moments of vertical accountability when voters can sanction corrupt candidates. This article documents the strategic use of corruption lawsuits, demonstrating the presence of an electoral cycle in filing new corruption accusations against politicians. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal courts against members of Argentina's main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we document increased corruption accusations against and by politicians in the periods immediately preceding an election. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is more salient before elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on using courts for accountability and debates about the so-called ‘lawfare’ in Latin America.

Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student editors at thirty-three top law reviews, we find that there is a gender gap in ambition for clerkships with the Supreme Court and Federal Courts of Appeal. Examining potential sources of this difference, we find that while women view themselves to be just as qualified for these positions as men, men are more willing to apply with lower feelings of qualification. Likewise, while women and men report similar levels of encouragement, more encouragement is required before women express ambition to hold these posts. The findings presented here have implications for research on judicial politics, political ambition, and women’s representation.

Debates over prison privatization neglect to consider differences in legal access across private and public prisons. I argue that private prisons experience lower filing rates than public prisons, and that cases brought against publicly traded private prison companies are less likely to be dismissed and more likely to succeed than similar cases against public prisons. I find evidence consistent with these claims, a result that is not driven by other explanations of judicial decision-making. This paper has implications for skepticism of private interests in public policymaking, and encourages investigation of access to justice for inmates in public and private custody.

While longstanding theories of political behavior argue that voters do not possess sufficient political knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable, recent revisionist studies challenge this view, arguing that voters can both follow how their representatives vote and use that information intelligently. We apply the revisionist account to the study of Supreme Court nominations in the modern era. Using survey data on the nominations of Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, we ask whether voters can and do hold senators accountable for their votes on Supreme Court nominees. While our results for Thomas are ambiguous, we find strong evidence for accountability in the cases of Sotomayor and Kagan. In particular, we show that voters on average can correctly recall the votes of their senators on these nominees, and that correct recall is correlated with higher levels of education and political knowledge. We then show that voters are more likely to both approve of and vote to re-elect their senator if he or she casts a vote on Sotomayor and Kagan that is in line with voters’ preferences. Finally, we show this effect is quite sizable, as it rivals the effect of agreement on other high-profile roll call votes. These results have important implications for both the broader study of representation and for understanding the current politics of Supreme Court nominations.

Despite the integral role of the judiciary to democracy, and the importance of judicial trust for judicial system performance, we know relatively little about the bases of public trust in this institution. How does institutional quality affect judicial trust? We explore this question in the context of Latin America, using a multilevel data set comprising survey data spanning 2001 to 2016 and country-level institutional and economic factors. We find that the effects of institutional quality on judicial trust are highly circumscribed. Factors like rule of law and corruption impact the judicial trust of only the best-educated survey respondents. Among the broader public, however, judicial trust is shaped more strongly by individuals' subjective economic and regime evaluations, as well as one's personal experiences with the judiciary.

Although the literature on US Supreme Court agenda-setting is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986 to 1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices’ cert votes on all paid cases from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard set of forces shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justices’ experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.

By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

What characteristics do state supreme court justices prioritize when choosing leaders? At the federal level, collegial court leaders are appointed or rotated by seniority. A plurality of states permit peer-vote selection, but the consequences of employing this mechanism are not well known. We develop a theory of chief justice selection emphasizing experience, bias, and politics. Leveraging within-contest variation and more than a half century’s worth of original contest data, we find that chief justice peer votes often default to seniority rotation. Ideological divergence from the court median, governor, and legislature is largely unassociated with selection. Justices who dissent more than their peers are, however, disadvantaged. We find no evidence of discrimination against women or people of color. The results have implications for policy debates about political leader selection.