A rapidly burgeoning literature in judicial politics concerns the variation in elements of writing style such as reading difficulty, cognitive complexity, affective language, and informality in judicial opinions. Some of these studies argue that judges strategically alter their writing style in anticipation of reactions from other actors. Others indicate that writing style is a function of judge characteristics as well as case-related factors. We investigate the correlates of writing style in US Circuit Courts of Appeals by analyzing a stratified random sample consisting of 11,771 opinions. Construing style broadly to encompass several dimensions suggested by prior work, we find that case and judge characteristics explain substantially more variance in writing style than do strategic considerations.

We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informationally motivated citizens are more likely to report awareness. Further, decision announcements increase awareness more generally, especially in cases of moderate salience. In contrast, for a very high salience case, awareness is high before and after the decision is announced, while, for a case fabricated by the investigators, “awareness” is not affected by the Court’s activities. The results suggest that while the public may eventually respond to the behavior of national institutions, this response is likely first filtered through an elite subset of the population.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of timing in political decision making. In this article, I consider the potential for the strategic timing of court decisions involving the constitutional review of statutes. As courts lack the ability to directly implement their decisions, scholars have identified an attentive public as invaluable for judicial authority. Building on this literature, I argue that the proximity of a national election increases awareness and thereby creates an environment conducive to the assertive exercise of constitutional review. I then present evidence of the electoral cycle’s effect on decision making at the German Federal Constitutional Court.

What explains expansions to the federal judiciary? Whereas existing research focuses on unified government as an explanation, we argue ideological proximity between institutions involved in the expansion process more accurately predicts judicial expansions. We examine whether Congress chose to add seats to each federal district or circuit court annually from 1937 to 2012 and find expansions are more likely when (1) the ideological distance between chambers of Congress is smaller and (2) the ideological distance between Congress and individual district or circuit courts is greater. These findings suggest the administration of federal courts is influenced by the political concerns in another branch of government, raising important questions about judicial independence.

The opinions of the US Supreme Court are central to volumes of research on law, courts, and politics. To understand these complex and often-lengthy documents, scholars frequently rely on dichotomous indicators of opinion content. While sometimes appropriate, for many research settings this simplification of opinion content systematically omits important information. Using all US Supreme Court opinions from 1803 to 2010 in association with structural topic models, I instead demonstrate the value of representing the Court’s attention in opinions in terms of topic proportions.

Recent scholarship suggests that Supreme Court decision making is significantly constrained by Congress and the public, often arguing that case salience is a key factor in the operation of these constraints. However, scholars have developed different theoretical expectations regarding the effects of case salience on justices and have found empirical support for mutually contradictory theories. Furthermore, these studies rely on an endogenous measure of case salience. I replicate two leading studies using a theoretically appropriate measure of case salience in order to shed new light on this important topic, finding evidence of constraint from the public in salient cases.

Analysis of Republican Party of Minnesota v. White by political scientists shows that White had no appreciable effect on the conduct or outcome of judicial elections, including a comprehensive study of White by Chris W. Bonneau, Melinda Gann Hall, and Matthew J. Streb. Yet there is reason to believe that White may have had a more narrow impact than Bonneau, Hall, and Streb originally allowed. An extension of their original analysis is conducted, with results showing that their findings are largely robust to more tailored model specifications. Exceptions include findings on ballot roll-off, but contradictory results further support the notion that White truly had no effect.