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On Courts and Pocketbooks

Macroeconomic Judicial Behavior across Methods of Judicial Selection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Douglas Rice
Douglas Rice*
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
*
Contact the author at drrice@olemiss.edu.
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Abstract

Scholars studying judicial behavior have identified a host of factors theoretically and empirically connected to judicial decision making. One recent theory identifies economic conditions—which have implications for the decisions of voters and politicians—as influencing the voting behavior of US Supreme Court justices. Yet the US Supreme Court is a unique judicial institution addressing limited—though indisputably important—economic cases every year. State courts, on the other hand, address a multitude of issues every year with economic ramifications. Building on the rich body of literature examining state courts of last resort, I analyze whether judges, across a variety of methods for judicial selection and retention, respond to temporary changes in the state of the economy. Results indicate that the responses of state supreme court judges to changes in the state of the economy are conditional on the electoral vulnerability of the justice. This research thus offers considerable insight into judicial behavior under different selection mechanisms and the conditional influence of the state of the economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 327 - 347
Copyright
© 2014 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Michael Berkman, Tom Clark, David Klein, Chris Zorn, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this research.

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