Maya Sen’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

... Bonneau et al. (2007) and Black and Owens (2009) show that a Supreme Court Justice may want to grant certiorari if she is ideologically closer to the median justice than to the appellate panel that made the decision in question. Bonica, Chilton and Sen (2023) show that the ideology of the appellate panel interacts with the ideologies of the petitioner and the respondent to predict certiorari. ...

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Setting the Supreme Court’s Policy Agenda

... In contrast, our agenda here is to: (1) demonstrate empirically that events in a similar class (e.g., the suppression of local self-government) which could plausibly constitute the basis of a legacy do not always do so, and; (2) explain why some events in the class generate legacies while others do not. 5 To this end, we develop a novel template for the comparative investigation of the establishment of legacies, one that combines a comparative 4 Comprehensive reviews of this literature are provided in Abad and Maurer (2021), Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2023), Cirone and Pepinsky (2022), Simpser, Slater andWittenberg (2018), andVoth (2021). For an overview that focuses on colonial legacies in particular, see De Juan and Pierskalla (2017). ...

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When are Junctures Critical? The Legacies and Non-Legacies of the Suppression of Local Self-Government

... As Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell also withheld a Supreme Court seat from Obama-nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 only to confirm Trump-nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the Court under similar circumstances in 2020 (Hulse, 2020). McConnell's actions solidified a radically conservative majority on the Court for the next several decades during a time that should have seen the first liberal majority in recent history (Chilton et al., 2023). Felony disenfranchisement, an issue exasperated by mass incarceration, continues to politically marginalize Black people in the U.S. as well. ...

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Racial Differences in Public Support for Federal Law Enforcement Finding and Prosecuting the January 6th Insurrectionists Who Broke Into the U.S. Capitol

... 4.1 | The core of court-hoarding: Judicial age and term limits As stated above, a judge's time in office may end "naturally" through term, age, or life limitations (Opeskin, 2015). Indeed, the introduction of Supreme Court term-limits has been the subject of intense debate in the U.S. context (Chilton et al., 2021), and some 96 constitutions around the world list some term length limitation for judges of the constitutional court (Constitute, n.d.). Of course, term length and term limits may also be regulated at the statutory level. ...

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Court‐hoarding: Another method of gaming judicial turnover

... If there is motivated reasoning among these judges, that could have substantial legal and policy impacts. Existing research on how Democrat and Republican Circuit Court judges behave differently is extensive (see [21] for a comprehensive review), but almost all of them focus on the decisions made by judges. For example, a recent work examines how the ideology of Circuit Court judges can affect case outcomes in a wide range of Circuit cases [22]. ...

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Motivated reasoning in the field: polarization of prose, precedent, and policy in U.S. Circuit Courts, 1891–2013

... This influence often leads state court judges to strategically adjust their rulings to align with selectors' preferences in order to retain office or secure promotion (Gray, 2017;Gray, 2019;Shepherd, 2009a;Shepherd, 2009b;Canes-Wrone, Clark, and Kelly, 2014;Black and Owens, 2016). When judges' independence is guaranteed by lifetime appointments, candidates' ideological alignment with selectors is central (Epstein and Segal, 2005;Cameron, Cover, and Segal, 1990;Binder and Maltzman, 2009;Bonica and Sen, 2020). According to the move-the-median theory, successful judicial nominees must shift the court's median closer to the US President's preferences while remaining ideologically moderate enough to gain Senate support (Krehbiel, 2007;Moraski and Shipan, 1999). ...

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Shaping the Bench: The Effect of Ideology and Performance on Judicial Reappointments

... Methodologically, one possible concern for both these measures is that a high court's discretion over which cases it will hear can bias data on a court's decisions. For example, in the United States, the Supreme Court accepts only 70 to 80 cases per year, and numerous studies find that judges' ideological interests affect whether they agree to hear a case (i.e., to grant certiorari) (Hall, 2009;Bonica, Chilton and Sen, 2022). In a case of severe democratic backsliding, the high court may simply decline to hear politically sensitive cases. ...

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Law versus Democracy: Reputation Costs, Judicial Alliance Networks, and Democratic Erosion in Turkey

... Since Peppers' Courtiers of the Marble Palace (2006), many studies have examined the selection of Supreme Court clerks (e.g., Kromphardt 2014;Kaheny et al. 2015;Badas and Stauffer 2023;Badas, Sanders, and Stauffer 2024) and the influence law clerks wield while serving the judge (e.g., Ward and Weiden 2006;Peppers and Zorn 2008;Black and Boyd 2012;Blake, Hacker, and Hopwood 2015;Kromphardt 2015;2017;Mascini and Holvast 2024;Bonica et al. 2019). Similarly, quite a few scholars have explored the influence of attorneys on the US Supreme Court (e.g., McGuire 1995;Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs 2006;Corley 2008;Black and Owens 2013;Gleason, Jones, and McBean 2019;Gleason 2020;Nelson and Epstein 2022) and other courts (e.g., Haynie and Sill 2007;Kaheny, Szmer, and Sarver 2011;Sheehan and Randazzo 2012;Szmer, Songer, and Bowie 2016). ...

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When the Courtiers Return to the Marble Palace: The Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Lawyers’ Prior Appellate Clerkship Experiences

... Analysing the impact of cultural and structural differences of judicial systems on algorithm selection, Virtucio et al. [24] and Long et al. [18] evaluate the effectiveness of different algorithms in Philippine Supreme Court and Chinese divorce cases, respectively. Focusing on methodological innovations in legal text analysis, Chalkidis et al. [25] proved the superiority of neural network-based language models in ECHR decisions with an F1score of 82%, while Kaufman et al. [26] demonstrated the potential of decision tree methodology in US Supreme Court decisions. These studies failed to model the specific linguistic features of the case type and the interactional dynamics between the parties' arguments. ...

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When defendants speak: Quantifying the predictive value of defence arguments in construction litigation

... Instead, voters' preference formation must be understood as a political process (Emmenegger and Marx 2019;Hall 2005). Moreover, future research on democratization might benefit from shifting the theoretical unit of analysis from individuals and their preferences to the geographical areas in which the individuals are embedded because local communities are often subject to processes of inter-generational socialization and institutional reinforcement (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2018;Caughey 2018). ...

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Landholding Inequality, Social Control, and Mass Opposition to Suffrage Extension