Most Supreme Court (SCOTUS) clerk studies explore selection, or impact, during the clerkship. The existing research examining the benefits of clerking for those returning to the Court suggests relational expertise from clerking for a specific justice, not process expertise from the clerkship, enhances SCOTUS oral argument success. Our study suggests the benefits of prior appellate clerkships likely stem from both relational and process expertise. Specifically, justices tend to favor parties represented by former US Court of Appeals (USCA) clerks who never clerked for the SCOTUS and prior SCOTUS clerks, even when the clerk did not serve in the justice’s chambers.

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.

Do inferior courts play a meaningful role in interbranch disputes between the judicial and other branches? In interbranch conflicts involving the judiciary, lower courts move first and may shape the direction of conflict before high courts intervene directly. This paper explores how this organizational feature affects the judiciary’s ability and willingness to constrain other branches, developing a formal model of an interbranch dispute involving a hierarchical judicial branch. The model demonstrates multiple mechanisms through which lower court decisions may alter the outcomes of interbranch disputes and explores when lower courts will initiate conflict with the other branches.

We argue that perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court can be influenced by stimuli paired with state courts. People with low levels of court knowledge will exhibit an assimilation effect in which residing in a state with an elected supreme court increases perceptions of the Court being political. People with greater knowledge will demonstrate a contrast effect, meaning that the Court will be perceived as less political compared to an elected state court. Using existing survey data and a new survey experiment, we find evidence of the assimilation effect for low-knowledge participants. Our results imply that fundamental perceptions of the Supreme Court can be shaped by stimuli that are objectively unconnected to the Court, and that many people do not effectively differentiate between different types of court.

This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free-expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively more libertarian and the European Court of Human Rights doctrine relatively more secularist, but both bodies of case law extend regular and substantial rights protection to religious minorities.

A longstanding debate in American judicial politics concerns whether the US Supreme Court anticipates or responds to the possibility that Congress will override its decisions. A recent theory proposes that opinions that are relatively hard to read are more costly for Congress to review, and that as a result, the Court can decrease the likelihood of override from a hostile Congress by obfuscating its opinions (i.e., writing opinions that are less readable when congressional review is a threat). I derive a straightforward but novel empirical implication of this theory; I then show that the implication does not in fact hold. This casts serious doubt on the claim that justices strategically obfuscate opinion language to avoid congressional override. I also discuss sentence tokenization as a source of measurement error in readability statistics for judicial opinions.

While we know that women's presence in the legislature positively impacts how citizens view the institution, little is known about the impact of women's presence on the legitimacy of high courts. We argue that despite differences in public expectations for courts, women's presence on the high court does impact citizen perceptions of legitimacy. However, this effect is dependent on both the level and the type of bias held by citizens. That is, when a person feels hostile bias toward women, the bias disrupts the potential legitimacy that the court could gain. On the other hand, we argue that benevolent sexism does not trigger any change in how citizens view the high court in a democracy. Using evidence from an experiment, we find that the presence of women on the high court has a strong positive impact on citizen perceptions of court legitimacy, though not among those with hostile gender bias.

The significance and influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions’ roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as precedents through the study of Supreme Court case citation patterns. We raise two limitations of existing work on Supreme Court citations. First, dyadic citations are typically aggregated to the case level before they are analyzed. Second, citations are treated as if they arise independently. We present a methodology for studying citations between Supreme Court opinions at the dyadic level, as a network, that overcomes these limitations. This methodology—the citation exponential random graph model, for which we provide user-friendly software—enables researchers to account for the effects of case characteristics and complex forms of network dependence in citation formation. We then analyze a network that includes all Supreme Court cases decided between 1950 and 2015. We find evidence for dependence processes, including reciprocity, transitivity, and popularity. The dependence effects are as substantively and statistically significant as the effects of exogenous covariates, indicating that models of Supreme Court citations should incorporate both the effects of case characteristics and the structure of past citations.

Previous research suggests that the mainstream media’s portrayals of the U.S. Supreme Court as an objective and impartial institution contribute to its diffuse support among the public. This study explores what happens if people are not exposed to these messages, relying instead on information sources that portray the Court and its justices as being politically oriented and motivated. We use the 2003 Blacks and the U.S. Supreme Court Survey data and coarsened exact matching to examine the effect of exposure to the Black media, whose reports are less likely to include legitimizing symbols of the Court. We find that exposure to the Black media significantly lowers people’s diffuse support for the Court among both Blacks and Whites. This result indicates that differences between Blacks and Whites with respect to their diffuse support for the Court are likely to be a function of the informational environment to which they are exposed rather than race per se.

Victoria Jannetta describes her experiences at the AALL annual meeting in Philadelphia focusing on various particular sessions given in relation to free speech, Delaware corporation law, company mergers, academic library issues and ebooks.

Leipzig 1989: dissolution of the East German state people or Staatsvolk – Karlsruhe 2020: dissolution of the German people – Courts and the people as a neglected constitutional relationship – Bundesverfassungsgericht's versions of the people – Analysis of the concept of people – Forms of action – Political people breaks down into two: original and electoral people – Marbury v. Madison – Duality as a matter of doctrine and principle – Duality in Lissabon Urteil – Conflation and reduction of authority to vote – Subordination of electoral to original people – The Court's logic pushed into motion – Exposing the constitution