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.

This paper develops and tests a theory that in states with judicial elections, criminal justice outcomes will be more punitive than in states without elections. Leveraging a data set previously unused in the judicial politics literature, I estimate time-series regressions of state sentencing and incarceration rates over a 38-year period while distinguishing between types of judicial elections to establish support for the theory. I find that states where trial judges are reelected are generally more punitive than states without judicial elections, and this punitiveness is in response to the public’s ideological preferences, indicating that elections serve as an important judicial accountability mechanism for citizens.

Congress routinely relies on private lawsuits to enforce its mandates. In this article, we investigate whether, when it does so, the details of the legislation can importantly influence the extent to which the private bar is mobilized to carry out the prosecutorial function. Using an original and novel data set based on review of archived litigation documents for cases filed in the Northern and Eastern Districts of California over the two decades spanning 1981–2000, we examine the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which increased economic damages available to Title VII job discrimination plaintiffs, on their ability to secure counsel. We find that over the course of the decade after passage, the law substantially increased the probability that Title VII plaintiffs would be represented by counsel and that in doing so it reversed a decade-long trend in the opposite direction.

Since the end of the 1980s the Supreme Court has cut its caseload nearly in half. While this decrease has not gone unnoticed, researchers have largely focused their explanations on institutional factors, such as changes in personnel, creation of the certiorari pool, or an increase in the amount of discretion justices have to set their agenda. Most existing work fails to consider how the preferences of members of Congress and the president also contribute to this staggering decrease. I provide the first systematic examination of how extrainstitutional influences affect the size of the Court’s caseload. I examine the 1951–2016 terms of the Court to reveal that a constraining political environment significantly reduces the number of cases the justices agree to hear each term. These results suggest that the justices consider the preferences of actors in the other branches of government much earlier than their decisions on the merits.

Courts regularly delegate tasks to individual or small subsets of judges. While a substantial literature addresses delegation in the context of American courts, less is known about why and how courts delegate from a comparative perspective. With many of the world’s high courts using panel systems (also known as “chambers”) by which the court delegates cases to subsets of judges, this limitation of the extant literature leaves a number of empirical and theoretical questions unanswered. We argue that the threat of noncompliance presents one factor influencing a court’s delegation of cases to panels. From our expectation that a court will not delegate cases with a greater risk for noncompliance to panels, we then derive empirical implications for case disposition and a court’s willingness to rule contrary to the legal merits in a case. We analyze panel usage at the Court of Justice of the European Union to support our account.

The concept of the constitutional revolution has become ubiquitous, but it is applied to all manner of things that are unlike each other in notable ways. It has been generously applied to events in such far-flung places as South Africa, Eastern Europe, Great Britain, India, Canada, Iran, Israel, and the United States. Despite its oxymoronic character, it has the potential to illuminate a much-vexed subject of scholarly inquiry. This article seeks to sharpen conceptual clarity in the way we depict constitutional change, specifically that species of change that entails significant breaks or departures in the workings of the constitutional order.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings place the often-reclusive institution in the public spotlight and afford members of the Senate Judiciary Committee the ability to pursue important personal and party goals. I construct and evaluate a measure of rhetorical sentiment that considers the positive and negative behaviors of committee members during Supreme Court confirmation hearings between 1971 and 2020. While some observers have pointed to the evolving dynamics of confirmation hearings as being the result of key inflection points, I find that these events alone do not explain rhetorical behaviors. Instead, my results suggest that rhetorical behaviors have been predominately mediated by structures of party control and the balance of interbranch political power since at least the 1970s. I conclude by noting how these behaviors can further deteriorate the public’s perceptions that the Court remains insulated from the contentious political environment.

Do lower court judges influence the content of Supreme Court opinions in the United Kingdom? Leveraging original data, we analyze opinion language adoption practices of the UK Supreme Court. We advance a theory where the justices’ choices to adopt language from lower court opinions are influenced by Supreme Court-level attributes and Court of Appeal case characteristics. We uncover compelling evidence that UK Supreme Court justices incorporate language extensively from the written opinions of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Our findings have significant implications for opinion formulation, doctrinal development, and higher and lower court interactions within comparative courts.

Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused on style as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation of the announced policy more likely. We give a formal argument that the observed distribution of opinion clarity is not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving to write clearly in service of policy implementation-related goals; this is true even if there are case-level costs that sometimes make writing clearly more difficult. We propose that justices having aesthetic preferences – essentially, stylistic preferences over opinion language that are unrelated to policy implementation – that they weight heavily could explain the observed distribution of opinion clarity. Our analysis of some 4,500 majority opinions 1955–2008 is largely consistent with our theoretical argument.

Examples abound of Supreme Court justices writing opinions because their ideological preferences or identity characteristics run counter to case outcomes, like when devoted Methodist and Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion codifying abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973). These stories suggest that in some controversial cases, the justices ask such incongruent justices to explain decisions because they believe those justices can underscore an opinion’s legal soundness and increase support for it. Does it work? We asked participants in two survey experiments to read about a pro-abortion or pro-death penalty ruling written by justices of differing ideologies and genders, and then we asked them to respond to the ruling. Their responses indicate that deploying identity-incongruent justices can influence responses, but not the way the justices expect. We find that incongruent opinion writers can reduce partisan differences in support for a Court decision but do not broadly increase public.

We investigate the impact of the consolidation of local agencies publicly providing services, focusing on the prosecution of crime. In many states in the United States, prosecution is a county office with a head prosecutor directing decisions. Other states merge counties into prosecutorial districts. We show that, along with the cost savings that arises, the evidence suggests that prosecutorial services benefit from increasing returns to scale. The efficiency of prosecutorial output is higher in consolidated districts. Further, we show that it is not owing to differing outcomes of the criminal justice system but to fewer inputs used.

Most theories of judicial politics are built around explaining the puzzle of judicial independence. This article instead theorizes explicitly about the conditions under which politicians are prone to manipulate their courts. By positing that courts can partly endogenously shape leaders’ fate at the hands of legislative opponents, we argue that greater political insecurity leads presidents to gut judicial independence, not shore it up. Drawing on a novel data set of judicial crises across 18 Latin American countries following the third wave of democratization, we show that variation in judicial crises is systematically correlated with the president’s risk of nonelectoral instability as captured by the history of past presidential crises, presidential power, and antigovernmental protests. To identify whether the effects of protest on judicial manipulation are causal, we use an instrumental variable approach based on international commodity prices weighted for each country.

High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influence is stronger in states with divided partisan governments and occurs more quickly in states that lack intermediate appellate courts. Our findings suggest that legislative gridlock and institutional thickness significantly constrain judicial impact.

The State of the Union represents an opportunity for the president to share policy goals with other political actors. Thus, the State of the Union can proxy how much information the Court has about executive preferences when receiving a case. We find that the less time a president devotes to a policy area, the more likely the Court is to issue a request for a brief in a case dealing with that issue area. This finding indicates that the Court is cognizant of presidential signals of policy preferences and actively seeks to supplement its understanding of the executive’s preferences.

High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. Focusing on this fact, we provide microfoundations for judicial preferences over legal rules by deriving them directly from expectations about the distribution of future cases. Doing so has important consequences: in contrast to standard assumptions in models of judicial decision-making, preferences over legal rules are asymmetric rather than symmetric. We demonstrate that this has significant implications for judicial decision-making on collegial courts. Finally, we show that changes in the case distribution—for example, as a result of technological change—can lead to significant legal change, even in the absence of ideological or doctrinal change on the court.

Scholars recognize that judicial review depends upon judicial independence: an independent court is more likely to invalidate a statute it opposes than a nonindependent court. But scholars have lost that the previous statement is a conditional relationship, in which judicial independence moderates the relationship between a court’s ideological preferences and its decision to strike statutes. I model this conditional relationship using the US Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions on important federal statutes. The analysis reveals that judicial independence is best modeled as a conditional predictor of judicial review and that modeling judicial independence as an additive predictor risks false negative results.

We test the political capital hypothesis that Supreme Court decisions simultaneously legitimate policy and harm support for the Court, at least under certain conditions. Our data suggest that the Court’s “legitimacy-conferring” capacity is weak. Learning that the Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action policy increased public support for the constitutionality and desirability of that policy, but only among Democrats pre-disposed towards that reaction. Furthermore, Democrats did not develop more favorable views of the Court. Consistent with the political capital hypothesis, Republicans developed more negative views of the Court when the Court associated itself with affirmative action policy.

This article presents an empirical study of statutory interpretation. Respondents were asked to read statutes and answer questions about how they should be applied to simple cases. The results suggest, first, that it is difficult to separate judgments about the linguistic meaning of a statute from policy preferences about it. Different ways of framing the interpretive question have consequences, however; asking how an ordinary reader would interpret a text helps produce answers that are distinct from a respondent’s own preferences about it. The article considers why this might be so and discusses implications for the interpretation of statutes by courts.

The Supreme Court sometimes chooses to use its limited time to revisit earlier decisions. In doing so, the justices signal the importance of reasserting, correcting, or reconsidering their arguments. We find that the likelihood of the Supreme Court revisiting a case in a given year increases significantly as the number of circuit courts critical of that opinion increases. These results suggest that an acknowledgment of the important role of the circuit courts influences the decision to revisit cases. Even if the Court merely clarifies or reinforces earlier opinions, criticism in the circuits prompts the Court to take some action. Though the Supreme Court’s word is final, barring a constitutional amendment or legislative override in nonconstitutional cases, the mechanism of criticism in the circuits allows reconsideration of many issues already decided by the Court and sheds light on the importance of institutional structures to the maintenance of the rule of law.

While many scholars have focused on the relationship shared between the Supreme Court and lower courts, fewer have studied how those outside the judicial branch implement court policy. This study examines how police implemented a major shift in vehicle search law after the Supreme Court placed limits on search incident to arrest. Comprehensive traffic-stop data from two states are relied upon for time series intervention analyses to test the decision’s impact. Evidence of the Court’s influence is found in seriously limiting searches incident to arrest and expanding the use of alternative searches as a means to circumvent the ruling.