A longstanding debate in American judicial politics concerns whether the US Supreme Court anticipates or responds to the possibility that Congress will override its decisions. A recent theory proposes that opinions that are relatively hard to read are more costly for Congress to review, and that as a result, the Court can decrease the likelihood of override from a hostile Congress by obfuscating its opinions (i.e., writing opinions that are less readable when congressional review is a threat). I derive a straightforward but novel empirical implication of this theory; I then show that the implication does not in fact hold. This casts serious doubt on the claim that justices strategically obfuscate opinion language to avoid congressional override. I also discuss sentence tokenization as a source of measurement error in readability statistics for judicial opinions.

How do ideological factors explain the citation patterns of federal courts? Current literature uses citation data in myriad ways but leaves open the question of how ideological factors may influence citation from each level of the judicial hierarchy differently. Combining original data on citations to Supreme Court opinions by district courts from 1969 to 2005 with existing data on citations by the courts of appeals and Supreme Court, I present a more complete portrait of the scope of a precedent across the federal judiciary. I find that ideological factors are associated with differences in citing behavior on the federal courts. Both the appellate and district courts are responsive to Supreme Court precedent, but district courts are not equally responsive to liberal and conservative updates to doctrine. Further, as the Supreme Court ideology changes from the time of setting precedent, appellate courts are less likely to cite the precedent, but district courts cite it more. These results suggest that the relationship between ideology and precedent adherence is complicated by the distinct institutional features of the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts.

This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free-expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively more libertarian and the European Court of Human Rights doctrine relatively more secularist, but both bodies of case law extend regular and substantial rights protection to religious minorities.

To compare court decisions in a systematic way, it is typically necessary to first read these decisions and then apply legal methods to them. Measurement models that support analysts in this manual labor usually rely on judges’ voting records. Since these data are often not available, we instead propose a latent-variable model that uses the widely available references in court decisions to measure the decisions’ latent position in their common case-space. We showcase our model in the context of forum shopping and forum selling of Germany’s lower courts.

Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused on style as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation of the announced policy more likely. We give a formal argument that the observed distribution of opinion clarity is not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving to write clearly in service of policy implementation-related goals; this is true even if there are case-level costs that sometimes make writing clearly more difficult. We propose that justices having aesthetic preferences – essentially, stylistic preferences over opinion language that are unrelated to policy implementation – that they weight heavily could explain the observed distribution of opinion clarity. Our analysis of some 4,500 majority opinions 1955–2008 is largely consistent with our theoretical argument.

Debates over prison privatization neglect to consider differences in legal access across private and public prisons. I argue that private prisons experience lower filing rates than public prisons, and that cases brought against publicly traded private prison companies are less likely to be dismissed and more likely to succeed than similar cases against public prisons. I find evidence consistent with these claims, a result that is not driven by other explanations of judicial decision-making. This paper has implications for skepticism of private interests in public policymaking, and encourages investigation of access to justice for inmates in public and private custody.

We test the political capital hypothesis that Supreme Court decisions simultaneously legitimate policy and harm support for the Court, at least under certain conditions. Our data suggest that the Court’s “legitimacy-conferring” capacity is weak. Learning that the Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action policy increased public support for the constitutionality and desirability of that policy, but only among Democrats pre-disposed towards that reaction. Furthermore, Democrats did not develop more favorable views of the Court. Consistent with the political capital hypothesis, Republicans developed more negative views of the Court when the Court associated itself with affirmative action policy.

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.

How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public’s outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy’s shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will.

This study investigates how citizens assess the credibility of constitutional experts on matters of government authority. Analyses of data from two similarly designed experiments, conducted with national samples, reveal that partisanship, race, and level of education are significant predictors of survey respondents’ willingness to extend credibility to constitutional experts. The compatibility of the views expressed by experts with respondents’ own policy views on issues that are the subject of proposed government action is also important. Evidence shows that this consistency is more important in the decision that experts are credible than in decisions that they are not credible, suggesting that esteem motives are relevant in the decision to credit experts who express views congenial to our own that are distinct from social-identity motives scholars have theorized to be important in partisan resistance to expertise. The implications of findings for holding government officials accountable to constitutional limits on government authority are considered.

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.

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.

Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student editors at thirty-three top law reviews, we find that there is a gender gap in ambition for clerkships with the Supreme Court and Federal Courts of Appeal. Examining potential sources of this difference, we find that while women view themselves to be just as qualified for these positions as men, men are more willing to apply with lower feelings of qualification. Likewise, while women and men report similar levels of encouragement, more encouragement is required before women express ambition to hold these posts. The findings presented here have implications for research on judicial politics, political ambition, and women’s representation.

In this paper, I create a simulation model that predicts the portfolio of judges the president chooses to fill vacancies in the judiciary. I find that the president’s strategy in terms of appointments depends on constraint from the Senate, the talent pool of possible judges to appoint, the ideology of the courts in the judiciary, and the number of vacancies to be filled. The model is successful in replicating results that have been found in previous research, while also generating new hypotheses about previously unexplored aspects of the appointment process.

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.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) uses a chamber system to more efficiently decide cases. To what extent, and under what conditions, does the CJEU’s chamber system undermine the consistency of the Court’s application of EU law? This paper contributes to the literature on the internal organization of collegial courts by presenting a computational formal model that predicts (a) that hearing cases in smaller chambers undermines the consistency of the Court’s application of EU law and (b) that the magnitude of this effect is larger when judges’ preferences are more heterogeneous and smaller when plaintiffs strategically bring cases. Based on these findings, I use machine learning and empirical data on CJEU judgments in infringement cases to estimate the degree to which we should expect the chamber system to undermine the consistency of the CJEU’s application of EU law in practice.

Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, marked the first time in the Court’s history that justices explicitly disagreed over the meaning and requirements of human dignity. In his dissenting opinion Clarence Thomas sought to reclaim rather than simply reject the language of dignity, advancing a conception of dignity that differed sharply from the conception embraced by the majority. Using this disagreement as a point of departure, this article demonstrates how dignity has served as an extra-textual value that underpins divergent visions of American constitutionalism that, in turn, inform interpretations of the Constitution’s text and history.

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.

How do judicial techniques enable courts to have a very effective impact on actual national policy while avoiding making binding decisions? Previous academic studies have focused mostly on the controversial capacity (and willingness) of courts to intervene in a country’s policy through statutory interpretation or authoritative decisions. We show that by refraining from sweeping landmark decisions, courts can have a latent but substantial impact on actual national policy through technical and procedural measures. The case study here is the Israeli immigration policy toward a large group of Palestinian litigants (916 petitions) who claim to be neglected security-related collaborators.

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.