To what degree is judicial agenda setting top-down or bottom-up? Existing studies lack evidence of the frequency or magnitude of these two processes. We conceptualize the judicial agenda as the legal questions/rules receiving judicial attention, measure it using citations to Supreme Court opinions, and estimate vector autoregression models to identify how each level of court initiates or responds to variation in attention to precedent at other levels of the judiciary. The Supreme Court exerts some top-down control, but agenda setting is more often bottom-up, revealing lower courts are more integral to setting the federal judicial agenda than previously understood.

We investigate when district judges stay litigation pending the resolution of parallel administrative proceedings. Leveraging unique aspects of patent litigation to create a robust test of the proposition, we consider how ideology conditions judicial behavior on this procedural judgment. We find that legal considerations guide stay decisions and that there is also an ideological dimension to that choice. Conservative district judges approach motions to stay consistent with conservative concerns regarding frivolous litigation even as they are influenced by case characteristics. This suggests a role for judicial discretion and implies that ideology’s influence in the district courts may be greater than frequently thought.

Judges who hear multiple cases a day may become exhausted by the time later cases are heard, increasing susceptibility to cognitive depletion, yet the role of workload fatigue in decision-making from hearing cases has rarely been tested in the U.S. One problem is the lack of public data—most U.S. courts do not maintain time-stamped records of case hearings. Using an original dataset of all traffic cases heard in Pulaski County, Arkansas in 2019 and 2020, we examine whether decision fatigue affects case outcomes. We find that charges are less likely to be dismissed in arraignment hearings at the end of a court session than in those at the beginning. This pattern, however, does not hold for trial hearings, suggesting that the effects of fatigue may be context-specific. We suggest policy recommendations to mitigate the effects of decision fatigue in lower courts—courts having the most contact with citizens.

There is convincing evidence that Americans have high, stable levels of knowledge about the Supreme Court. Yet, this conclusion masks variance in political knowledge associated with ethnicity. Using data from surveys of Latinos and non-Latinos fielded before and after the Supreme Court’s rulings in Arizona v. United States and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, we find Latinos know less about the Court than other Americans. However, Latinos’ knowledge of the Court increased significantly between the surveys, while others’ Supreme Court knowledge did not. We discuss the implications of this result for the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and civic education policy.

This article challenges international criminal tribunals’ (ICTs) capacity to perform the socially constitutive work of transitional justice. Highlighting paradigmatic ICT jurisprudence, I show that both the “progress” and “justice” constructs central to the work and legitimacy of international criminal law are unrealizable under current ICT practice. This is due to international criminal law’s foundational, legitimizing basis in natural law rather than political liberalism. I call for a revision of ICT institutional accountability structures.