Research of judges and courts traditionally centers on judgments, treating each judgment as a unit of observation. However, judgments often address multiple distinct and more or less unrelated issues. Studying judicial behavior on a judgment level therefore loses potentially important details and risks drawing false conclusions from the data. We present a method to assist researchers with splitting judgments by issues using a supervised machine learning classifier. Applying our approach to splitting judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union into issues, we show that this approach is practically feasible and provides benefits for text-based analysis of judicial behavior.

Do inferior courts play a meaningful role in interbranch disputes between the judicial and other branches? In interbranch conflicts involving the judiciary, lower courts move first and may shape the direction of conflict before high courts intervene directly. This paper explores how this organizational feature affects the judiciary’s ability and willingness to constrain other branches, developing a formal model of an interbranch dispute involving a hierarchical judicial branch. The model demonstrates multiple mechanisms through which lower court decisions may alter the outcomes of interbranch disputes and explores when lower courts will initiate conflict with the other branches.

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.

This article presents the CJEU Database Platform, which provides scholars with an extensive collection of easily accessible, research-ready data on the the universe of cases, decisions, and judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU Database Platform provides a foundation for the broader CJEU Database currently being developed by The IUROPA Project, a multidisciplinary group of scholars researching judicial politics in the European Union (EU). In this article, we illustrate how the CJEU Database Platform opens the door to new areas of theoretical and empirical research on judicial politics in the EU.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death near the end of the Trump presidency set off a fight in which Republicans moved to rapidly replace her over Democrats’ objections. I use a survey that was in the field at the time to assess whether this period affected the Court’s legitimacy. I find that Democrats who responded in the days just after Justice Ginsburg’s death saw the Court as less legitimate than those who responded shortly before it. These findings connect to broader questions about the sources of Court legitimacy, the mechanisms through which it changes, and the impact of contestation over appointments.

We evaluate the politics of interim judicial appointments at the state level. Although nominating commissions have been established to promote merit-based selection, we argue that governor-applicant ideological concordance and financial support for a governor’s campaigns increase one’s odds of being appointed. We focus on the impact of political factors, as well as the qualifications of prospective judges. We analyze over 4,000 applications to fill interim judicial vacancies in Georgia from 1991 to 2014. Our findings indicate that ideological proximity and campaign donations to the governor increased the likelihood of appointment to the bench with their influence overpowering some indicators of competence.

This study documents disparities on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, and gender in court awards regarding the loss of future earnings in road accident cases in Israel. We analyze a random selection of 236 court decisions in road accident cases that reached final decisions on their merits between 1978 and 2018 in which the nationality, ethnicity, and gender of victims were identifiable (via first and last names). We show that, although in Israel the reliance on sex- and race-based statistical data to calculate damages in tort cases is a prohibited practice, courts tend to reach lower estimates of future lost earnings for Mizrahi Jews, Arabs, and women than those of otherwise similarly situated Ashkenazi Jewish men. In the analyses, we hold injured persons’ earnings at the time of the accident and occupations constant. The effects we observe are significant in magnitude. The results of our study are particularly noteworthy given the fact that we document disparities that correspond with the already existing labor force inequalities and discrimination in hiring, salary, and promotion on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, and gender in Israel.