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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.