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Publications
Publications (59)
A growing body of research theorizes that partisanship can undermine democracy as citizens prioritize their political interests over abstract norms and values. We argue that crises might counteract intense partisanship by giving citizens clarity on the threats posed by rule of law violations. Examining the differential application of a law – a brea...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
U.S. courts have long been thought to be held in special regard by the American public, and public support is theorized to protect institutions from interbranch aggression. At the same time, recent research underscores that institutional fealty and public reaction to court curbing is shaped by partisan concerns. Drawing on a survey experiment field...
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Regarding decision-making, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges dim...
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...
OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES or so, social scientists have looked with renewed interest at the problem of inequality in the United States, teaching us that at least some portion of this country’s growing political, legal, economic, and social inequality is a function of the policy decisions made by U.S. political institutions.¹ For example, the work o...
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...
On December 3, 2017, Bolivian voters went to the polls to vote for their national judges. Bolivia is the only country in modern world history to use direct elections to select its judges, and the adoption and implementation of these elections has been highly contentious. We report on this election and contend that though formally compliant with the...
Does the use of judicial review by unelected judges harm public support for their decisions? Scholars have often answered this question in the affirmative. We examine the extent to which the use of judicial review reduces the ability of judges to achieve acceptance of their decisions, arguing that decisions made by elected judges may be more palata...
Under what conditions should judges be held accountable to their constituents for the decisions they make? In framing our question as we have we are immediately tipping our hand on two crucial issues: (1) we assume that judges have constituents, which is, of course, technically true of more than 90% of American judges, and (2) we imply that under a...
Why are some opinions widely discussed while others remain obscure? We theorize that opinions that can be understood efficiently are discussed, expanded, and contracted more frequently. Additionally, more persuasive precedents tend to be discussed and expanded more regularly, while less persuasive precedents are narrowed more often. These effects s...
Dissenting opinions are common in the US Supreme Court even though they take time and effort, risk infuriating colleagues, and have no precedential value. In spite of these drawbacks, dissents can potentially contribute to future legal development. We theorize that dissenting justices who use more memorable language are more successful in achieving...
Most decisions about policy adoption require preference aggregation, which makes it difficult to determine how and when an individual can influence policy change. Examining how frequently a judge is cited offers insight into this question. Drawing upon the psychological concept of social identity, we suggest that shared group memberships can accoun...
To what degree is the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court currently at risk? Perhaps the most widely accepted view of how the Supreme Court acquires and maintains its legitimacy is positivity theory, which claims that the legitimizing symbols of judicial authority protect the Court's legitimacy from dissatisfaction with its rulings. Although resea...
Existing theories of legislative-judicial relations emphasize the role of public support for the judiciary on the likelihood of legislative compliance. Although Congress can strengthen or weaken the Supreme Court’s decisions after initial compliance, the role of public support for the judiciary on subsequent legislative action is unclear. We develo...
Does increased judicial independence lead to increased state respect for empowerment rights? Initial research on this topic suggested an affirmative answer, but new data calls this into question. We use new measures and modeling approaches to re-examine the effect of de facto judicial independence on state respect for empowerment rights. Empowermen...
Political pundits and scholars alike have recently noticed that public judgments of how well the US Supreme Court is doing
its job have plummeted. Yet, the meaning of this drop for the larger legitimacy of the Court is not as clear as the poll data
themselves. Some believe that dissatisfaction with the Court’s rulings threatens the institution’s le...
Theories of legislative policy diffusion are well formed and extensively tested, but scholars know far less about the diffusion of legal policy and reasoning. Three decades ago, Caldeira’s “The Transmission of Legal Precedent: A Study of State Supreme Courts” examined this topic, but the intervening decades have been marked by considerable changes...
As the gatekeepers of federal law, U.S. Attorneys have a strong influence on legal policy. While U.S. Attorneys are presidential appointees subject to Senate confirmation, the rules governing their appointments differ significantly from those used for executive and judicial nominees. Specifically, U.S. District Courts may name interim appointees if...
Having been victimized by the abuses of individual peace-officers as well as discriminatory public policies such as “stop and frisk,” it is no surprise to find that considerable alienation seems to characterize the contemporary relationship between African Americans and the legal institutions that govern them. But have those attitudes poisoned more...
This article reviews the literature on the measurement and consequences of judicial independence worldwide. First, the article discusses the difficulties inherent in defining judicial independence. Next, the article describes various measures of de facto and de jure judicial independence and their properties. Finally, the article describes the cons...
How do judges decide cases? This article reviews the myriad factors that may influence judicial behavior, including law, ideology, and strategic behavior, and argues that no single factor can explain judicial decision-making; instead, the choices justices make are influenced by a combination of factors. The article concludes with some suggestions f...
In 2011, Bolivia became the first modern country to directly elect national judges. Reformers heralded the adoption of judicial elections as a “democratization of justice,” by which institutional independence would be assured, public confidence in the judiciary might be expanded, and various maladies of the judicial system would find resolution. We...
Scholars have rediscovered the theory of institutional legitimacy, with a vengeance. This reinvigorated attention has produced some vexing controversies, none of which is more important than that of whether the Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends upon satisfying the ideological expectations of the American people. That debate has recently been enlar...
Research on the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court has blossomed of late, with scholars investigating many different hypotheses derived from legitimacy theory. As the theory has been pushed, a number of new controversies have emerged. Here, we identify four such debates: (a) whether the Court's legitimacy rests on satisfaction with its performance,...
Voters often make the effort to go to the polls but effectively throw their vote away by leaving their ballot blank or intentionally spoiled. Typically construed as anomalous or errant, we argue that blank and spoiled ballots are empirically differentiable and politically informative. We consider self-reported vote choice from a nationally represen...
Do elected judges and prosecutors change their behavior to reflect public opinion after they receive information about constituent preferences? In this article I use a unique measure of public opinion—votes on an initiative to legalize marijuana—to examine the responsiveness of prosecutors and trial court judges to a strong, issue-specific, constit...
Political pundits and scholars alike have recently noticed that public judgments of how well the U.S. Supreme Court is doing its job have plummeted. Yet, the meaning of this drop for the larger legitimacy of the Court is not as clear as the poll data themselves. Some believe that dissatisfaction with the Court’s rulings threatens the institution’s...
Studies of state judicial selection systems require accurate classification of electoral systems. While agreement exists for most states, Ohio and Michigan are difficult to classify. In this paper, we discuss the different practices and explain how, in the absence of candidates' party affiliation on the ballot, elections in these states may justifi...
Bartels and Johnston have recently presented evidence suggesting that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is grounded in the ideological preferences and perceptions of the American people. In addition, they offer experimental data purporting to show that dissatisfaction with a single Court decision substantially diminishes the institution’s legitim...
