We examine whether state judicial selection methods influence people’s evaluations of US Supreme Court nominees. We find that people from appointing states use nominee characteristics in their evaluations differently than people in electing states. Those from appointing states appear to be more concerned with traditional legal factors, while people from electing states appear to be slightly less concerned with them. Although the importance varies from characteristic to characteristic, state judicial selection system has a broad role in shaping how people evaluate judicial nominees. These findings counsel further research on judicial institutions and the public’s expectations of judges.

Since the end of the 1980s the Supreme Court has cut its caseload nearly in half. While this decrease has not gone unnoticed, researchers have largely focused their explanations on institutional factors, such as changes in personnel, creation of the certiorari pool, or an increase in the amount of discretion justices have to set their agenda. Most existing work fails to consider how the preferences of members of Congress and the president also contribute to this staggering decrease. I provide the first systematic examination of how extrainstitutional influences affect the size of the Court’s caseload. I examine the 1951–2016 terms of the Court to reveal that a constraining political environment significantly reduces the number of cases the justices agree to hear each term. These results suggest that the justices consider the preferences of actors in the other branches of government much earlier than their decisions on the merits.

As the chief litigator for the US government, the solicitor general plays a crucial role in the Supreme Court decision-making process. The justices and solicitor general share a mutually beneficial relationship that is reinforced by the solicitor general’s willingness to provide legal advice when asked. In this article, we examine whether and how this relationship changes when the solicitor general files a formal “confession of error.” Using data on confessions filed between the 1979 and 2014 terms, we find the justices are significantly less likely to support the solicitor general’s position at multiple stages of the Court’s decision-making process if the solicitor general confesses error in light of a policy change. This punishment is harshest when the solicitor general provides advice as an amicus curiae participant, but it is only temporary. These results provide new insight into the scope and limitations of benefits allotted to the Court’s “tenth justice.”

Presidents may react to Supreme Court decisions by supporting or opposing them in their public rhetoric and by calling on Congress to take action to alter or implement the Court’s decisions. We investigate this unique form of lawmaking using an original database of presidential calls to Congress and congressional reactions. We find that presidents call for congressional action to pursue their policy goals and enhance the power of the presidency; we also find that Congress reacts when it is asked to do so by both the Court and the president, as well as when presidents support the implementation of the Court’s decisions.

Research on judicial behavior has yet to systematically examine the extent to which ideology affects voting behavior outside of rights-based issues. This study explores the predictive effect of judicial ideology on judicial votes in a country without a bill of rights: Australia. We develop an ex ante measure of judicial ideology and use original data on every Australian High Court decision between 1995 and 2019 to test whether, and in which types of cases, votes of Australia’s justices align with their ideology. The results show that ex ante ideology is predictive of voting behavior, regardless of policy area.

The federal judicial system is a hierarchy with district courts at the bottom, courts of appeals in the middle, and the Supreme Court at the top. A second, less visible, judicial hierarchy exists within district courts, with magistrate judges situated below district judges. Existing scholarship largely ignores magistrate judges, assuming they are agents tasked with procedural matters with little independent effect on federal courts adjudication. Using a combination of national administrative data (2000–2016) and original case-level data from nine district courts (1997–2014), we find that district courts not only grant meaningful responsibility and discretion to magistrate judges but do so in ways that vary substantially across and within districts. The effects of this judicial delegation extend from procedural rulings to substantive outcomes. Our findings provide evidence that a complete understanding of federal judicial decision making accounts for the roles—procedural and substantive—that magistrate judges perform.

Most theories of judicial politics are built around explaining the puzzle of judicial independence. This article instead theorizes explicitly about the conditions under which politicians are prone to manipulate their courts. By positing that courts can partly endogenously shape leaders’ fate at the hands of legislative opponents, we argue that greater political insecurity leads presidents to gut judicial independence, not shore it up. Drawing on a novel data set of judicial crises across 18 Latin American countries following the third wave of democratization, we show that variation in judicial crises is systematically correlated with the president’s risk of nonelectoral instability as captured by the history of past presidential crises, presidential power, and antigovernmental protests. To identify whether the effects of protest on judicial manipulation are causal, we use an instrumental variable approach based on international commodity prices weighted for each country.

Human capital theory suggests that work experience acquired through on-the-job-training primes people to be more successful. Empirical validations of this hypothesis are numerous, but limited evidence of the relevance of human capital for courtroom advocacy exists. We examine whether the outcomes obtained by experienced attorneys are significantly better than the outcomes they would have obtained as novices. Adopting a strategy for credible causal inference that could be applied to almost any peak court, the analysis shows that attorneys with experience, relative to first timers, are significantly and consistently more likely to win their cases and capture the votes of judges.

We exploit the nonhierarchical nature of the European Union legal system to investigate the effect of negative feedback on intercourt cooperation. We argue that, in the context of a nonhierarchical referral system, formal dismissals expose shirking, which the principal, the referral court, has no formal power to curb. Yet we find that when referring courts have experienced a formal dismissal, they are not only more likely to resubmit but also more likely to see their references accepted. This effect increases with the number of formal dismissals previously experienced. Our findings suggest that referring courts expect significant benefits from cooperation that the referral court is able to leverage to ameliorate the quality of the referring judges’ work.

Free speech is essential to democracy and political participation. But scholars hold competing expectations about whether courts will protect free speech in similar ways for extremism. Drawing on free speech cases from high courts in Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa, as well as from the European Court of Human Rights, I show that judges are substantially less likely to support free speech in cases involving extremist claimants or extreme speech. Moreover, I demonstrate how judges tailor arguments in response to concerns about extremism. This evidence has implications for our understanding of judicial behavior and the role that courts play in preserving democracy.

Does a domestic constitutional court within a state encourage greater acceptance of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? This question is particularly relevant in Islamic law states (ILS). One might expect that ILS, which embrace the rule of law domestically, might do so internationally. However, this expectation paints an overly simplistic picture of the constitutional court’s role and its relationship with domestic and international politics. Employing original data on constitutional references to constitutional courts (1946–2012), we show that in the context of ILS, acceptance of the ICJ’s jurisdiction is conditional on an independent constitutional court.

Courts regularly delegate tasks to individual or small subsets of judges. While a substantial literature addresses delegation in the context of American courts, less is known about why and how courts delegate from a comparative perspective. With many of the world’s high courts using panel systems (also known as “chambers”) by which the court delegates cases to subsets of judges, this limitation of the extant literature leaves a number of empirical and theoretical questions unanswered. We argue that the threat of noncompliance presents one factor influencing a court’s delegation of cases to panels. From our expectation that a court will not delegate cases with a greater risk for noncompliance to panels, we then derive empirical implications for case disposition and a court’s willingness to rule contrary to the legal merits in a case. We analyze panel usage at the Court of Justice of the European Union to support our account.

Despite our understanding that the US Supreme Court influences lower courts in a top-down fashion, we examine whether state courts influence Supreme Court work, namely, its majority opinions. This study of lower court influence on Supreme Court opinion writing investigates whether and when justices borrow language from state court opinions. While our fundamental interest is in whether the writings of state court judges are influential in Supreme Court opinions, we further investigate whether justices’ biases against elected judiciaries and favor for appointed systems play a role here. Our original data set includes Supreme Court cases reviewing state court decisions from 1995 to 2015. Results show that the potential for lower court influence differs for appointed versus elected state court judges, lending valuable insight into the discussion of judicial power and institutional design. Meanwhile, state courts play an important role in the development of law at the Supreme Court.

We investigate when district judges stay litigation pending the resolution of parallel administrative proceedings. Leveraging unique aspects of patent litigation to create a robust test of the proposition, we consider how ideology conditions judicial behavior on this procedural judgment. We find that legal considerations guide stay decisions and that there is also an ideological dimension to that choice. Conservative district judges approach motions to stay consistent with conservative concerns regarding frivolous litigation even as they are influenced by case characteristics. This suggests a role for judicial discretion and implies that ideology’s influence in the district courts may be greater than frequently thought.