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.

Does merit selection work? Existing evidence on institutional performance compares outcomes of interest across selection mechanisms, which does not account for the two-stage process that makes merit selection unique. Using information obtained from public records requests, this article analyzes the determinants of commission and gubernatorial selections from relevant candidate pools. The evidence suggests that although commissions and governors seem to select on certain qualifications, women are disadvantaged at the commission stage and partisanship is relevant at both stages. The results have important implications for our understanding of merit selection’s institutional performance and the broader judicial selection debate.

The previous literature debates whether rising rates of dissent are best explained by changes in court leadership and the composition of justices or by greater judicial discretion and changes in agenda. This article examines the influential hypotheses derived from the literature in the relevant and testable European case of the Supreme Court of Norway. It shows that the rising rate of dissent in the Court in the 1990s was mainly catalyzed by fundamental changes to the Court’s discretionary power and by its newfound agenda to work more actively with the development of the law and the protection of human rights.

This is part 1 of a two-part series detailing the selection and confirmation processes of lower federal court judges during President Obama’s first 6 years. Our attention in part 1 is on Obama’s lower federal court appointments during the 113th Congress, specifically on the selection processes. We then examine the backgrounds and attributes of those confirmed during the 113th, looking at the appointees to the district and appeals courts separately. Confirmation processes are the main focus of part 2 of our study, where we discuss the lead-up to the nuclear option, the “fallout” from its invocation, and the renewed emphasis on the Blue Slip system as a tool of the minority party in the Senate. We conclude by taking a deeper look at the administration’s historic contribution to enhancing diversity on the federal bench across the district and circuit courts and, as well, make a similar assessment of the impact of the Obama appointments on the partisan makeup of the federal bench on the district courts and across the appellate circuits.

US Supreme Court confirmation hearings provide senators with an opportunity to engage a potential justice on a nationwide stage. Senators probe for information about future behavior on the bench. Nominees work through the questions, oscillating between forthcoming and vague responses. Such behavior encourages popular narratives that characterize this intricate dance as a “vapid and hollow charade.” We challenge this wisdom and argue that senators use these hearings to provide meaningful representation to their constituents while simultaneously supporting copartisan efforts regarding the nominee. We examine the exchanges in 185 senator-nominee pairings that span nearly 30 years of confirmation hearings. Our results show that senators from both parties increase their question-asking activity during divided government, when confirmation success is more dubious. Senators from the president’s party ask fewer questions when their constituents support the nominee, however, suggesting that popular support can attenuate this general effect for senators expecting a successful confirmation.

This article is the first comprehensive empirical study of chief justice appointments to the Judicial Conference committees of the US Courts, entities with influence over substantive public and legal policy. Using a newly created database of all judges appointed to serve on Judicial Conference committees between 1986 and 2012, the results indicate that a judge’s partisan alignment with the chief justice matters, as do personal characteristics such as race, experience on the bench, and court level. These results support claims that Judicial Conference committee selection, membership, and participation may present a vehicle for advancing the chief justice’s individual political and policy interests.

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.

Human capital theory suggests that work experience acquired through on-the-job-training primes people to be more successful. Empirical validations of this hypothesis are numerous, but limited evidence of the relevance of human capital for courtroom advocacy exists. We examine whether the outcomes obtained by experienced attorneys are significantly better than the outcomes they would have obtained as novices. Adopting a strategy for credible causal inference that could be applied to almost any peak court, the analysis shows that attorneys with experience, relative to first timers, are significantly and consistently more likely to win their cases and capture the votes of judges.

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.

The austerity policies pursued in several countries during the Eurozone crisis began to call attention to the role played by courts as relevant actors in the context of budgetary and financial stress. The case of the Portuguese Constitutional Court has often been singled out in national and international forums as one characterized by particularly intense activism in this respect. Allegedly, political conflict around austerity policies and the demand for their judicial review had fundamentally changed the role of the Portuguese Constitutional Court and the behavior of its judges. However, after examining these claims empirically, we find that, when properly assessed with scrutiny of comparable legislation in other periods, the judicial behavior on austerity policies exhibits a much less exceptional pattern than often argued. Constitutional review in Portugal seems to respond to institutional arrangements (i.e., those fostering a central role for ideological preferences and party loyalty) and not to specific business cycles.

This article probes explanations for the linkages between Supreme Court justices’ broad ideological stances and their positions in specific issue areas. The justices’ votes in decisions on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment showed no consistent ideological pattern in the 1937–79 terms but have fallen along clear ideological lines since then. Analysis of relevant evidence indicates that this shift reflected both changes in the content of takings cases and changes in the lineup of political and social groups on takings issues. The shift and its sources suggest a need to rethink the role of the justices’ policy preferences in shaping their choices.

The power of government to take private property for public use has been a frequent source of political disquiet because of the tension it creates with notions of individual rights ingrained in liberal society. The backlash against takings after Kelo offers a case in point. Existing research has focused on the public’s distaste for the taking of homes and has thus missed an important cause of the backlash: the purpose for which property is taken. I utilize a combination of experimental and observational methods to advance our understanding of this important issue, finding that purpose is crucial in shaping attitudes toward takings.

How often, at what times, and on what issues do courts directly make policy or indirectly influence policy making by other branches of government? We assess the judicial contribution to policy change using 268 policy histories covering 14 issue areas of US domestic policy making from 1945 to 2004. Contrary to the prominent view that courts are relatively inconsequential policy-making institutions, we find that federal courts made or influenced nearly one in four significant federal policy changes. Courts directly made almost as many significant policies as the executive branch and indirectly influenced about as many significant policies in other branches as Congress. We also find that judicial policy making and influence are concentrated in a few time periods and issue areas.

Over the past 30 years many observers of the federal courts have expressed concern over mounting dockets, arguing that the taxing workloads for federal judges could have a variety of negative consequences, including difficulties in judicial recruitment and retention. However, assessing the plausibility of those and similar claims requires the use of appropriate measures of judges’ workload. We introduce scholars and practitioners to new measures of caseload for the district courts available from 1964 through 2012. We detail the methodology for constructing our measures and then assess changes in caseload over time, both within and across courts. We argue that, in most cases, the preferred measure of caseload incorporates weighted filings and accounts for the service of senior status judges and vacancies. We conclude by pointing scholars toward additional research avenues that can be undertaken with our publicly available data.

This research note investigates how “tort tales”—cultural memes about the American civil legal system—affect citizens’ attitudes on tort reform. While legal scholarship has extensively analyzed “tort tales” using qualitative approaches, this analysis introduces quantitative methods from political psychology. I explore a case study of Stella Liebeck, the woman who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s. An experiment embedded in an original survey of 742 Americans shows that exogenously providing people with information about the legal urban legend increased support for tort reform. Further, those with incorrect interpretations of the story are most supportive of tort reform initiatives.

Even if party capability theory has been well documented, parsing out the reasons why “haves” come out ahead has been challenging. Our study takes advantage of the Argentine Supreme Court’s power to dismiss appeals because they contain formal errors to ascertain the existence of representational advantage. We show that representational advantage plays a significant role, as individual appellants represent a larger proportion of appeals rejected on formal grounds than of those analyzed on their merits. In addition, certain areas of law where asymmetrical capability is prevalent and consistent, particularly labor law, are significantly overrepresented in appeals rejected on formal grounds.

When do judges initiate public action outside the courtroom? What kinds of political activities do they engage in? What are the consequences of their interactions with social and political actors? This article investigates judges’ efforts to influence law and policy as opinion leaders, protesters, and network builders. In light of recent devevelopments in Turkey, I argue that intrajudicial conflict, that is, the increasing salience of hitherto dormant tensions inside the judiciary, is the primary source of off-bench judicial mobilization. Participants in off-bench judicial mobilization seek to maintain, reform, or transform judicial institutions in ways that enhance their ideational and strategic goals.

I gather new data on local media coverage of state supreme court elections and examine its effects on voter participation. I find that, even when controlling for campaign expense and advertising, media coverage can increase voter engagement in state supreme court contests. While some of this effect is attributable to salient campaigns themselves, content and statistical analyses show that the media provide voters with unique information such as candidate qualifications that can also stimulate their participation.

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.

While panel effects—instances in which panel composition affects the votes cast by judges—have been widely documented, scholars are unsure why these patterns persist. We outline three possible mechanisms, acquiescence, deliberation, and strategy, through which panel effects might occur; develop indicators for each; and test them using a data set of search and seizure cases decided by the US courts of appeals between 1953 and 2010. Our analysis provides some evidence that counterjudge success stems from a combination of all three theories, although strategic considerations have the substantively strongest and most consistent effects.