Since courts lack control of the purse and the sword, understanding what causes the public to accept court decisions is essential. Using three studies, this paper shows that the public’s perception of the process judges use to make decisions changes the determinants of acceptance. When judges are perceived as using a principled decision-making process, institutional loyalty determines acceptance. When judges are perceived as using a politicized decision-making process, agreement with the policy implications of a decision determines acceptance. These results emphasize the importance of decision-making process perceptions in ensuring that courts can induce voluntary acceptance of their decisions.

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.

We present a new cross-national measure of de facto judicial independence, which is available for 200 countries from 1948 to 2012. To do so, we introduce a statistical measurement model for uncovering latent concepts commonly encountered in time-series, cross-sectional analyses in comparative politics and international relations. Our approach addresses unique challenges that arise in these data: temporal dependence in the observed and unobserved variables, conceptual boundedness in the latent quantity, and substantial missing data and measurement error in the observable indicators. The resulting measures match a common conceptual definition of independence with greater reliability than existing alternatives. The model is extensible to many concepts in comparative politics and international relations.

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 paper evaluates the impact of a higher court articulating doctrine as either a “rule” or a “standard.” The legal doctrine we evaluate concerns police searches based upon information supplied by confidential informants. The Supreme Court’s Aguilar-Spinelli test was a rule, and its Illinois v. Gates “totality of the circumstances” test is a standard. Using a data set of circuit court opinions from 1951 to 1999, we compare circuit-level implementation of these two doctrines. The results suggest that rules are more effective than standards at constraining ideological voting in lower courts.

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

Justices use information from attorneys, amici, and the solicitor general to learn about cases. One source that has gone with little empirical scrutiny is their law clerks. I validate a measure of clerk preferences and analyze the role of information conveyed by clerks in shaping the justices’ votes on the merits. I report asymmetric support for the theory that clerks get what they want when they craft credible signals: the results support the conclusion that conservative clerks can influence vote direction. These findings bolster understanding of the role of information in hierarchical relationships and shine light on clerks’ roles.

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.

I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.

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.

This is part 1 of a two-part series detailing the selection and confirmation processes of lower federal court judges during President Obama’s first 6 years. Our attention in part 1 is on Obama’s lower federal court appointments during the 113th Congress, specifically on the selection processes. We then examine the backgrounds and attributes of those confirmed during the 113th, looking at the appointees to the district and appeals courts separately. Confirmation processes are the main focus of part 2 of our study, where we discuss the lead-up to the nuclear option, the “fallout” from its invocation, and the renewed emphasis on the Blue Slip system as a tool of the minority party in the Senate. We conclude by taking a deeper look at the administration’s historic contribution to enhancing diversity on the federal bench across the district and circuit courts and, as well, make a similar assessment of the impact of the Obama appointments on the partisan makeup of the federal bench on the district courts and across the appellate circuits.

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.