Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outline strategies for learning from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits are often an attempt to enlist help from the state in resolving an underlying civil dispute.

What strategies do judges employ when they anticipate review? Constrained judges behave strategically by using particular instruments—like language complexity—when authoring opinions. Prior studies suggest that judges use complexity in anticipation of legislative hostility. Similarly, the threat of review and reversal may spur opinion complexity. This study examines variations in circuit court opinions resulting from precedent treatment and Supreme Court preferences. When a circuit negatively treats a Supreme Court precedent that the justices prefer or a circuit positively treats a precedent that the justices dislike, opinion complexity should increase. These hypotheses find support, suggesting that circuits strategically insulate using opinion complexity.

Dissenting opinions are part of the ongoing constitutional dialogue among elites both inside and out of the judiciary. In order to illustrate how dissents contribute to the ongoing constitutional dialogue among elites, we examine the effect of dissents on majority opinions in the US Supreme Court. We empirically assess their operation on the contemporary Court. We find that dissents with certain characteristics are more effective than others on prompting the majority opinion to cite and discuss them. Specifically, majority opinions cite and discuss dissents that have a negative emotional tone; contain formal, logical, and hierarchical thinking; use adverbs; have a mixed ideological coalition; and cite a high number of Supreme Court precedents. These results suggest that strategic dissenters will have more in-house impact than others.

How do political actors use rhetoric after an initial policy battle? We explore factors that lead Supreme Court justices to integrate disagreeable rhetoric into opinions. Although disagreeable language has negative consequences, we posit that justices pay this cost for issues with high personal significance. At the same time, we argue that integrating disagreeable rhetoric has a deleterious effect on the institution by reducing majority coalition size. Examining opinions from 1946 to 2011 using text-based measures of disagreeable rhetoric, we model the language of opinion writing as well as explore the consequences for coalition size. Our findings suggest serious implications for democratic institutions and political rhetoric.

We investigate the impact of the consolidation of local agencies publicly providing services, focusing on the prosecution of crime. In many states in the United States, prosecution is a county office with a head prosecutor directing decisions. Other states merge counties into prosecutorial districts. We show that, along with the cost savings that arises, the evidence suggests that prosecutorial services benefit from increasing returns to scale. The efficiency of prosecutorial output is higher in consolidated districts. Further, we show that it is not owing to differing outcomes of the criminal justice system but to fewer inputs used.

Because decision making is complicated, political elites seek advice when making decisions, and the ways in which they use that advice has systematic features. But, analyses of decision making among elites usually fail to account for advice. We take advantage of unique information about the advice provided to one set of elites to empirically uncover the effect of advice. Specifically, we examine law clerk recommendations on cert to Justice Blackmun. We find that, even after controlling for known determinants of cert and considering sequential decision making, the advice of a trusted advisor matters greatly.

France maintains a court system outside of the European continent in so-called overseas regions such as Martinique and New Caledonia. Held as colonies until the 1940s, these territories became part of the French state with varying degrees of autonomy. Drawing on original qualitative and archival research, this article argues that through these overseas courts, France continues to legally assume the traditional role of a colonial power despite its declared commitment to the nation-state, republican model. Subordinating discourses and elements of colonial structure have outlived the transition to nonempire, continuing to exert strong influences on the courts’ operations, especially the way in which judges and prosecutors are appointed and promoted. This study should also be read as a contribution to the scholarship on how court systems around the globe grapple with the legacy of colonialism in shaping their organizational structure and practices.

Conventional wisdom suggests that judicial legitimacy should be relatively unaffected by satisfaction with the ideological direction of judicial policy making. Recent studies challenge this assertion. The key to resolving this conundrum is estimating individual-level satisfaction with the ideological direction of judicial policy making reliably and validly. We examine the accuracy of several common measures of the concept. We find that 40% of the respondents repudiate their own scores on these measures. With this much systematic measurement error in such an important independent variable, the question of whether the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy is conditional on ideological agreement with its decisions must be reexamined.

I gather new data on local media coverage of state supreme court elections and examine its effects on voter participation. I find that, even when controlling for campaign expense and advertising, media coverage can increase voter engagement in state supreme court contests. While some of this effect is attributable to salient campaigns themselves, content and statistical analyses show that the media provide voters with unique information such as candidate qualifications that can also stimulate their participation.

While panel effects—instances in which panel composition affects the votes cast by judges—have been widely documented, scholars are unsure why these patterns persist. We outline three possible mechanisms, acquiescence, deliberation, and strategy, through which panel effects might occur; develop indicators for each; and test them using a data set of search and seizure cases decided by the US courts of appeals between 1953 and 2010. Our analysis provides some evidence that counterjudge success stems from a combination of all three theories, although strategic considerations have the substantively strongest and most consistent effects.

Judicial ethics and conduct guides emphasize dignity, decorum, patience, and courtesy, contributing to an understanding of judging as rational, detached, and unemotional. However, these are also interactional capacities, implying the presence of emotion and emotion work. Empirical research finds that judicial officers express considerable awareness of the need for judicial emotional capacities and emotion work and undertake a range of strategies to manage emotion. This judicial experience shows that available guidance does not adequately address emotion in judicial officers’ everyday work. Improved guidance will explicitly recognize judicial work as an interactional space, generating emotion and demanding emotion work.

We examine interest group involvement in Supreme Court nominations from 1930 to 2017, finding dramatic shifts in the number and type of groups, as well as their choice of tactics. Whereas the early period was dominated by labor unions, “core” civil rights groups, and groups affiliated with the “old right,” the modern period is dominated by public interest/citizen groups and “identity” groups. We also find a shift from more traditional “inside” tactics to the heavy use of “outside/grassroots” mobilization tactics. Finally, we show that the calculus of mobilization has increasingly been based on a nominee’s ideology over time.

US Supreme Court confirmation hearings provide senators with an opportunity to engage a potential justice on a nationwide stage. Senators probe for information about future behavior on the bench. Nominees work through the questions, oscillating between forthcoming and vague responses. Such behavior encourages popular narratives that characterize this intricate dance as a “vapid and hollow charade.” We challenge this wisdom and argue that senators use these hearings to provide meaningful representation to their constituents while simultaneously supporting copartisan efforts regarding the nominee. We examine the exchanges in 185 senator-nominee pairings that span nearly 30 years of confirmation hearings. Our results show that senators from both parties increase their question-asking activity during divided government, when confirmation success is more dubious. Senators from the president’s party ask fewer questions when their constituents support the nominee, however, suggesting that popular support can attenuate this general effect for senators expecting a successful confirmation.

The Inter-American Human Rights System takes into account domestic political contexts in ways that sometimes have not been fully recognized. International human rights courts face a tension between the goal of expanding rights and the need to gain legitimacy with domestic constituencies. Cases involving national amnesty laws have posed this dilemma in acute fashion in the Inter-American System. An analysis of those cases and their domestic political contexts shows how the Commission and the Court have taken into account domestic circumstances, the first through the timing of referrals and the second through the Court’s jurisprudence.

International courts are increasingly affecting domestic and international politics and are receiving increased attention in political science research. In addition to their political importance, international courts provide new opportunities for testing theories of judicial politics, yet further progress requires access to data, particularly on the courts that have so far received less scrutiny. This article introduces a new database on Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) judgments. The database contains information on case proceedings, judicial behavior, judgment content, the actors involved, and compliance with remedial orders. The current version of the database contains data on 201 IACtHR cases. We illustrate how the database can be used to address important questions in judicial politics by analyzing whether the propensity of the IACtHR to rule against a responding state correlates with the positions taken by the same state early in the proceedings before the court. We find evidence of such a relationship.

The first, hidden stage of the Supreme Court’s agenda-setting process is the formation of the “discuss list,” the small set of cases actually considered in conference. Yet few have systematically considered the operation of and the influences on this critical initial phase of decision making. No systematic, empirical work makes comparisons over time of how features of cases shape the makeup of the chief justice’s discuss list. Here, we examine the composition of the discuss list through a multivariate analysis of all paid petitions for certiorari filed in October Term 1939, 1968, and 1982. We are thereby able to compare the tendencies and efficacy of three long-serving chief justices—Hughes, Warren, and Burger—in making up the discuss list. And, methodologically, we present an alternative to the “observed-value” and the “representative-case” methods of calculating effect sizes for second differences, with software to implement our proposal.