Legal doctrine is generally thought to contribute to legal decision-making only to the extent it determines substantive results. Yet in many cases, the available authorities are indeterminate. I propose a different model for how doctrinal reasoning might contribute to judicial decisions. Drawing on performance theory and psychological studies of readers, I argue that judges’ engagement with formal legal doctrine might have self-disrupting effects like those performers experience when they adopt uncharacteristic behaviors. Such disruptive effects would not explain how judges ultimately select, or should select, legal results. But they might help legal decision makers to set aside subjective biases.

For decades now, experiments have revealed that we humans tend to evaluate the views or activities of our own group and its members more favorably than those of outsiders. To assess convergence between experimental and observational results, we explore whether US Supreme Court justices fall prey to in-group bias in freedom-of-expression cases. A two-level hierarchical model of all votes cast between the 1953 and 2014 terms confirms that they do. Although liberal justices are (overall) more supportive of free-speech claims than conservative justices, the votes of both liberal and conservative justices tend to reflect their preferences toward the speech’s ideological grouping and not solely an underlying taste for (or against) greater protection for expression. These results suggest the importance of new research programs aimed at evaluating how other cognitive biases identified in experimental work may influence judicial behavior in actual court decisions.

A significant undiscussed problem with the leading conceptualization of ideologically based judicial behavior, Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth’s attitudinal model, is its lack of theory. This problem leads to circular reasoning, ad hoc coding adjustments, and inaccurate characterizations and explanations of case outcomes, judicial votes and ideologies, and trends in judicial behavior. A values-based theory of ideology, such as the cultural theory pioneered by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky, and others, can help remedy this problem. Applying this cultural theory to First Amendment cases, we find that political cultures valuing equality, order, and liberty provide a more accurate account of judicial decisions than labeling them liberal or conservative.

Judicial empowerment is often cited as a driver of transnational governance, particularly in the European Union. In this view, lower national courts enthusiastically began referring cases to the European Court of Justice to acquire new powers of judicial review. Revisiting this argument, I argue that path dependent, everyday practices within domestic judiciaries stemming from insufficient training in European Union law, workload pressures, and cultural aversions to judicial review can resist Europeanization even when it would lead to empowerment. The argument is evaluated via a critical case study of judicial practice in Italy that is placed in a broader comparative context.

The legislature wields multiple tools to limit judicial power, but scholars have little information about how judges interpret variant threats and which they find most concerning. To provide insight, we conduct original interviews regarding legislative threats to courts with over two dozen sitting federal judges, representing all tiers of the federal judiciary. We find that judges have a nuanced understanding of threats and tend to identify components of legislative proposals that threaten formal institutional powers as more concerning than those challenging policy set by judges. This distinction has broad implications for our understanding of judicial behavior at the federal level.

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.

In 2006, the Bush administration directed nine US attorneys to resign. This decision was a partial cause of the attorney general’s departure from the administration, and it prompted investigations and congressional hearings. Seen as largely ad hoc, we argue that theory predicts a more systematic decision-making process. We investigate this empirically and find, consistent with literature on principal-agent theories and bureaucracy, that performance on easily monitored metrics and adverse-selection concerns predict the firings. We explore the implications of these findings for efforts to centralize decision-making in the Department of Justice and to exert political control over US attorneys.

Despite being a dominant explanation of judicial independence in democracies for over a decade, the “insurance” model has received little systematic attention. I argue that how we conceptualize democracy is especially important for analyses of judicial independence employing this insurance framework, demanding more careful attention from scholars. I illustrate that empirical results are contingent on specific conceptualizations by replicating the single existing study examining the insurance model across democracies globally. In doing so, I demonstrate that existing findings are largely driven by classifying electoral authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia as democracies.