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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.