We examine whether state judicial selection methods influence people’s evaluations of US Supreme Court nominees. We find that people from appointing states use nominee characteristics in their evaluations differently than people in electing states. Those from appointing states appear to be more concerned with traditional legal factors, while people from electing states appear to be slightly less concerned with them. Although the importance varies from characteristic to characteristic, state judicial selection system has a broad role in shaping how people evaluate judicial nominees. These findings counsel further research on judicial institutions and the public’s expectations of judges.

Presidents may react to Supreme Court decisions by supporting or opposing them in their public rhetoric and by calling on Congress to take action to alter or implement the Court’s decisions. We investigate this unique form of lawmaking using an original database of presidential calls to Congress and congressional reactions. We find that presidents call for congressional action to pursue their policy goals and enhance the power of the presidency; we also find that Congress reacts when it is asked to do so by both the Court and the president, as well as when presidents support the implementation of the Court’s decisions.

Research on judicial behavior has yet to systematically examine the extent to which ideology affects voting behavior outside of rights-based issues. This study explores the predictive effect of judicial ideology on judicial votes in a country without a bill of rights: Australia. We develop an ex ante measure of judicial ideology and use original data on every Australian High Court decision between 1995 and 2019 to test whether, and in which types of cases, votes of Australia’s justices align with their ideology. The results show that ex ante ideology is predictive of voting behavior, regardless of policy area.

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.

Free speech is essential to democracy and political participation. But scholars hold competing expectations about whether courts will protect free speech in similar ways for extremism. Drawing on free speech cases from high courts in Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa, as well as from the European Court of Human Rights, I show that judges are substantially less likely to support free speech in cases involving extremist claimants or extreme speech. Moreover, I demonstrate how judges tailor arguments in response to concerns about extremism. This evidence has implications for our understanding of judicial behavior and the role that courts play in preserving democracy.

Does a domestic constitutional court within a state encourage greater acceptance of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? This question is particularly relevant in Islamic law states (ILS). One might expect that ILS, which embrace the rule of law domestically, might do so internationally. However, this expectation paints an overly simplistic picture of the constitutional court’s role and its relationship with domestic and international politics. Employing original data on constitutional references to constitutional courts (1946–2012), we show that in the context of ILS, acceptance of the ICJ’s jurisdiction is conditional on an independent constitutional court.