Do people turn on those who turn to the courts? Using a survey experiment, we find people have significantly more negative attitudes toward personal injury litigants than other types of claimants, even when they believe the claimant is injured and mostly not at fault. Moreover, our subjects were not anti-claim, anti-hiring a lawyer, or even anti-government program. Instead, they were distinctively anti-litigant.

Do elected judges tailor criminal sentences to the electorate’s ideology? Utilizing sentencing data from North Carolina’s Superior Courts—which transitioned from statewide to local elections in 1996—we study whether judges are obliging to voters’ preferences. We find some evidence of responsiveness: judges from liberal districts were more lenient, while those from moderately conservative districts assigned harsher sentences. Judges from increasingly conservative districts did not change their sentencing patterns, which leads to lower re-election rates. These findings suggest that judges adapt their behavior to retain office, or else they are held accountable by the public.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings place the often-reclusive institution in the public spotlight and afford members of the Senate Judiciary Committee the ability to pursue important personal and party goals. I construct and evaluate a measure of rhetorical sentiment that considers the positive and negative behaviors of committee members during Supreme Court confirmation hearings between 1971 and 2020. While some observers have pointed to the evolving dynamics of confirmation hearings as being the result of key inflection points, I find that these events alone do not explain rhetorical behaviors. Instead, my results suggest that rhetorical behaviors have been predominately mediated by structures of party control and the balance of interbranch political power since at least the 1970s. I conclude by noting how these behaviors can further deteriorate the public’s perceptions that the Court remains insulated from the contentious political environment.

Latinos, especially those who recently immigrated, face many obstacles in navigating the political and judicial environment in the United States. While prior scholarship suggests that racial minorities are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement for traffic violations and face harsher penalties for major crimes, little research has explored whether a defendant’s characteristics are influential in routine traffic court cases. Using an original database, this paper examines disparate treatment in speeding ticket reductions. The results indicate that Latino defendants are less likely to receive meaningful reductions to their charges. However, attorney representation greatly lessens the likelihood of disparate treatment for Latino drivers. As traffic court proceedings often represent the only interaction most people have with the judicial system, these findings have significant implications for racial equality, the administration of justice, attorney representation, and public opinion of the judiciary.

Interest groups often post about their judicial advocacy on social media. We argue that they do so for two main reasons. First, providing information about the courts on social media builds the group’s credibility as a source of information with policymakers, media and the public. Second, social media provides a way to claim credit for litigation activity and outcomes, which can increase membership and aid in fundraising. Using original datasets of millions of tweets and Facebook posts by interest groups, we provide evidence that interest groups use social media for public education and to credit claim for their litigation activity.

Based on an analysis of all administrative court cases published in the Netherlands in 2020 (N = 4,642), we tested the hypothesis that experienced law clerks write judgments with greater confidence than less experienced clerks. A confidently written judgment was defined as being shorter, less standardized, and containing fewer legal references than a less confidently written judgment. In support of this hypothesis, our results showed that law clerks with more experience co-signed judgments that were less standardized and contained fewer legal references. However, contrary to the confidence hypothesis, we established that these judgments were also longer than judgments co-signed by less experienced clerks. Our study contextualizes the concerns expressed in studies on the US Supreme Court about the delegation of drafting duties to inexperienced law clerks. The study challenges the assumption that delegation of drafting duties to law clerks automatically results in judgments with a less confident writing style, due to the clerks’ inexperience. The assumption may hold for the US Supreme Court, where all law clerks are relatively inexperienced. However, the assumption does not hold in jurisdictions in which law clerks can be just as experienced (in terms of years worked in the legal field) as judges. This conclusion suggests that research on the functioning of the US Supreme Court cannot necessarily be generalized to other jurisdictions.

How does oral argument attendance impact public perceptions of the judiciary? Judicial independence is partly contingent on public support, but the conditions that generate institutional good will are not well understood. We examine how judicial outreach and court exposure inform public attitudes. Leveraging a field-experiment randomizing in-person attendance at oral arguments conducted by a federal circuit court of appeals on a university campus, we find that exposure increases perceptions of institutional legitimacy and the extent to which judicial decisions are motivated by law versus politics. The results have important implications for judicial politics and policy debates concerning reform initiatives involving circuit riding, courtroom cameras, and public outreach.

Examples abound of Supreme Court justices writing opinions because their ideological preferences or identity characteristics run counter to case outcomes, like when devoted Methodist and Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion codifying abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973). These stories suggest that in some controversial cases, the justices ask such incongruent justices to explain decisions because they believe those justices can underscore an opinion’s legal soundness and increase support for it. Does it work? We asked participants in two survey experiments to read about a pro-abortion or pro-death penalty ruling written by justices of differing ideologies and genders, and then we asked them to respond to the ruling. Their responses indicate that deploying identity-incongruent justices can influence responses, but not the way the justices expect. We find that incongruent opinion writers can reduce partisan differences in support for a Court decision but do not broadly increase public.

What effect does political competition have in generating de facto judicial independence? We argue that competition in a legislature can drive increases in de facto judicial independence. Our game-theoretic model reveals that increased competition for seats impedes legislators’ ability to enact their platforms, regardless of government turnover probability, and increased legislative fractionalization also makes court intervention more likely. Utilizing a sample of democratic states, empirical evidence suggests when a country’s legislature is increasingly fractionalized among parties or has increasing seat turnover, we observe increases in de facto independence. This research provides new perspectives on the link between independence and competition.

Institutional designers of judiciaries often want to provide the appearance of impartiality. As a result, many collegial courts issue per curiam rulings in which judges’ votes are not public. An extensive scholarship, however, provides evidence that ideology and mechanisms of retention affect judicial decision-making. Do per curiam rulings actively mitigate or provide cover for ideological and career-oriented judicial decision-making? I argue that – when serving as the rapporteur (opinion-writer) – a judge on a civil law per curiam court can steer their panel towards the outcome their appointer prefers. When their appointing government turns over, nonetheless, a judge is not compelled to change their decision-making to be in line with their new government, as per curiam rulings protect them from retaliation. An analysis of decisions at the Court of Justice of the European Union provides evidence for this account.

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.

Do lower court judges influence the content of Supreme Court opinions in the United Kingdom? Leveraging original data, we analyze opinion language adoption practices of the UK Supreme Court. We advance a theory where the justices’ choices to adopt language from lower court opinions are influenced by Supreme Court-level attributes and Court of Appeal case characteristics. We uncover compelling evidence that UK Supreme Court justices incorporate language extensively from the written opinions of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Our findings have significant implications for opinion formulation, doctrinal development, and higher and lower court interactions within comparative courts.