How often, at what times, and on what issues do courts directly make policy or indirectly influence policy making by other branches of government? We assess the judicial contribution to policy change using 268 policy histories covering 14 issue areas of US domestic policy making from 1945 to 2004. Contrary to the prominent view that courts are relatively inconsequential policy-making institutions, we find that federal courts made or influenced nearly one in four significant federal policy changes. Courts directly made almost as many significant policies as the executive branch and indirectly influenced about as many significant policies in other branches as Congress. We also find that judicial policy making and influence are concentrated in a few time periods and issue areas.

While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but decisions themselves are an act of judicial politics. Because this coverage measure is affected only after a decision is announced, using it limits the types of inferences we can draw about salience. We develop a measure of latent salience, one that builds on existing work, but that also explicitly incorporates and models predecision information. This measure has the potential to ameliorate concerns of causal inference, put research findings on sounder footing, and add to our understanding of judicial behavior.

Scholars have found that citizens tend to evaluate European institutions in light of how they feel about their own domestic institutions (second-order evaluations). We argue that this approach is more appropriate for understanding international courts than is the legitimacy approach of the law and courts literature. While studies applying the second-order evaluations approach have overwhelmingly focused on EU institutions, here we seek to determine whether second-order evaluations are also characteristic of citizens’ opinions about the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate our hypotheses using a sample of the British population and find strong support for the general second-order evaluation.

This article examines the feminization of the judiciary in France and in the United States through the prism of the “imagined judge,” that is, the judge as he or she is represented in a specific legal culture. The French imagined judge is a knowledgeable automaton mechanically applying the law entirely created by the parliament, while his or her American counterpart is a decision maker well equipped to solve social problems. Interpreting the gender composition of the judiciary through the intellectual device of the imagined judge leads to a crucial observation: there is a correlation between the conceptualization of the imagined judge as a being exercising power, as in the United States, and the continued underrepresentation of women on the bench. From this observation comes an important hypothesis: the conceptualization of judging as an act of power works to keep women off the bench.prism

In 2011, Bolivia became the first modern country to directly elect national judges. Reformers heralded the adoption of judicial elections as a “democratization of justice,” by which institutional independence would be assured, public confidence in the judiciary might be expanded, and various maladies of the judicial system would find resolution. We evaluate the elections in light of these objectives. We show candidates were advantaged when voters shared their partisan and demographic traits, resulting in unprecedented diversity on the national courts. Also, public confidence in the judiciary increased among government supporters but declined overall. We offer preliminary reflections for would-be reformers.

This research note investigates how “tort tales”—cultural memes about the American civil legal system—affect citizens’ attitudes on tort reform. While legal scholarship has extensively analyzed “tort tales” using qualitative approaches, this analysis introduces quantitative methods from political psychology. I explore a case study of Stella Liebeck, the woman who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s. An experiment embedded in an original survey of 742 Americans shows that exogenously providing people with information about the legal urban legend increased support for tort reform. Further, those with incorrect interpretations of the story are most supportive of tort reform initiatives.

High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influence is stronger in states with divided partisan governments and occurs more quickly in states that lack intermediate appellate courts. Our findings suggest that legislative gridlock and institutional thickness significantly constrain judicial impact.