Matthew E K Hall
Biographic Data
| ID | 2573920 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew E K Hall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew E K |
| FAMILY NAME | Hall |
| SIGNATURE | HALL M E K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0802-0415 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Yeah, it’s biased, but … ”
Political plausible deniability
While many social biases are considered taboo, bias against political outgroups is increasingly explicit, ubiquitous, and tolerated. We contend that expressing political bias can reduce third-party perceptions of socially unacceptable biases-a phenomenon we call political plausible deniability . By diverting attributions away from biases based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, individuals can express bias yet ostensibly align with social no…
The January 6th, 2025, Project
The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, can easily be viewed as a culmination of serious threats to democracy that have been building in our nation for years. I introduce this volume first by showing that the core challenges to our democracy are not new: public opinion survey data show that, for decades, 25 to 30 percent of Americans promote racial and religious hierarchies, believe conspiracies and misinformation, distrust dem…
Considerations in Personality Measurement
In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implemen…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
Holding versus Dicta
Who controls the content of the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court? Previous research offers conflicting views; however, these studies assume that a single justice exerts primary influence over the entire opinion. In contrast, we argue that different justices control holding (the legal determination that sets binding precedent) and dicta (unnecessary comments that lack precedential value). We argue that the bargaining process enables the …
Friends You Can Trust
How do interest groups influence U.S. Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of their preferred outcomes? Following prior research on the influence of the Solicitor General, we develop and expand on the signaling theory of interest group influence via amicus curie briefs. We argue that an interest group's ideological reputation and the nature of the ideological signal it sends in its brief both function as powerful heuristics that convey informa…
Judicial Review as a Limit on Government Domination
For centuries, politicians, activists, and academics have criticized the American system of judicial review as democratically illegitimate. In response, dozens of scholars have striven to justify the institution’s place in a democratic political system. A compelling justification for judicial review must provide a realistic description of its function and a normatively attractive understanding of that function. Unfortunately, the most prominent j…
The Role of Emotional Language in Briefs before the US Supreme Court
The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using a…
Macro Implementation
Policy implementation is usually studied at the micro level by testing the short‐term effects of a specific policy on the behavior of government actors and policy outcomes. This study adopts an alternative approach by examining macro implementation—the cumulative effect of aggregate public policies over time. I employ a variety of methodological techniques to test the influence of macro criminal justice policy on new admissions to federal prison …
Discouraging Dissent
Chief judges often strive to promote consensus in their courts to promote public confidence, durable precedents, and intracourt collegiality; yet, some chiefs succeed, whereas others fail. In this article, we identify institutional factors that facilitate and hinder the chief’s ability to promote consensus by examining dissent rates in every state court of last resort from 1995 to 2004. Consistent with prior work, we find that consensus is partia…
Understanding Judicial Power
High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influe…
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
Holding Steady on Shifting Sands
Empirical claims that US Supreme Court decisions tend to follow public opinion raise important questions about the countermajoritarian role of the American judiciary. Yet, for the vast majority of federal cases, the de facto court of last resort is actually a US court of appeals. We examine the role of public opinion in shaping decisions on these courts. We argue that the courts of appeals' position in the judicial hierarchy, lack of docket contr…
Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts
Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges,Journal …
Testing Judicial Power
The U.S. Supreme Court is traditionally thought to hold little influence over social or political change; however, recent evidence suggests the Court may wield significant power, especially with regard to criminal justice. Most studies evaluate judicial power by examining the effects of individual rulings on the implementation of specific policies, but this approach may overlook the broader impact of courts on society. Instead, I adopt an aggrega…
Keeping the Outliers in Line? Judicial Review of State Laws by the U.S. Supreme Court
Objective Proponents of the “regime politics” approach argue that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to promote the interests of the dominant partisan coalition even while engaging in seemingly countermajoritarian behavior. These scholars suggest that the Court's invalidation of state laws is used to enforce a national consensus against outlier states. We argue this claim does not withstand empirical analysis. Method We employ logistic regression analy…
The Semiconstrained Court
Numerous studies have found that elite and popular preferences influence decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court; yet, uncertainty remains about when, how, and why the Court is constrained by external pressure. I argue the justices are constrained, at least in part, because they fear nonimplementation of their decisions. I test this theory by utilizing a recent study of judicial power, which finds the Court enjoys greater implementation power i…
New Data on State Supreme Court Cases
The study of U.S. state supreme courts has been significantly constrained by a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency, this article introduces an original data set of every state supreme court ruling from 1995 through 2010. We utilize automated textual analysis to search the text of thousands of state supreme court decisions and extract critical information on each case. This automated coding approach produces reliable measures of stat…
Rethinking Regime Politics
Many recent studies of “regime politics” argue that judicial review is ultimately used to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime. I explore this claim by evaluating whether the invalidation of federal laws by the US Supreme Court fits the empirical expectations of the regime politics approach. I find that the Court frequently invalidates statutes when (1) the ideology of the Court diverges from that of the sitting elected branches…
Experimental Justice
This study utilizes the random assignment of judges to panels in the U.S. courts of appeals to measure how the partisanship of these judges affects whether or not the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case and subsequently overturns the decision of the lower panel. Results from the study provide evidence of partisan behavior in the Supreme Court review process in several politically salient issue areas between 1995 and 2004. Although most lower cour…
The Semiconstrained Court
Numerous studies have found that elite and popular preferences influence decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court; yet, uncertainty remains about when, how, and why the Court is constrained by external pressure. I argue the justices are constrained, at least in part, because they fear nonimplementation of their decisions. I test this theory by utilizing a recent study of judicial power, which finds the Court enjoys greater implementation power i…
Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts
Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges,Journal …
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
New Data on State Supreme Court Cases
The study of U.S. state supreme courts has been significantly constrained by a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency, this article introduces an original data set of every state supreme court ruling from 1995 through 2010. We utilize automated textual analysis to search the text of thousands of state supreme court decisions and extract critical information on each case. This automated coding approach produces reliable measures of stat…
The Role of Emotional Language in Briefs before the US Supreme Court
The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using a…
Discouraging Dissent
Chief judges often strive to promote consensus in their courts to promote public confidence, durable precedents, and intracourt collegiality; yet, some chiefs succeed, whereas others fail. In this article, we identify institutional factors that facilitate and hinder the chief’s ability to promote consensus by examining dissent rates in every state court of last resort from 1995 to 2004. Consistent with prior work, we find that consensus is partia…
Rethinking Regime Politics
Many recent studies of “regime politics” argue that judicial review is ultimately used to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime. I explore this claim by evaluating whether the invalidation of federal laws by the US Supreme Court fits the empirical expectations of the regime politics approach. I find that the Court frequently invalidates statutes when (1) the ideology of the Court diverges from that of the sitting elected branches…
Experimental Justice
This study utilizes the random assignment of judges to panels in the U.S. courts of appeals to measure how the partisanship of these judges affects whether or not the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case and subsequently overturns the decision of the lower panel. Results from the study provide evidence of partisan behavior in the Supreme Court review process in several politically salient issue areas between 1995 and 2004. Although most lower cour…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
Friends You Can Trust
How do interest groups influence U.S. Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of their preferred outcomes? Following prior research on the influence of the Solicitor General, we develop and expand on the signaling theory of interest group influence via amicus curie briefs. We argue that an interest group's ideological reputation and the nature of the ideological signal it sends in its brief both function as powerful heuristics that convey informa…
Macro Implementation
Policy implementation is usually studied at the micro level by testing the short‐term effects of a specific policy on the behavior of government actors and policy outcomes. This study adopts an alternative approach by examining macro implementation—the cumulative effect of aggregate public policies over time. I employ a variety of methodological techniques to test the influence of macro criminal justice policy on new admissions to federal prison …
Understanding Judicial Power
High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influe…
Holding Steady on Shifting Sands
Empirical claims that US Supreme Court decisions tend to follow public opinion raise important questions about the countermajoritarian role of the American judiciary. Yet, for the vast majority of federal cases, the de facto court of last resort is actually a US court of appeals. We examine the role of public opinion in shaping decisions on these courts. We argue that the courts of appeals' position in the judicial hierarchy, lack of docket contr…
Testing Judicial Power
The U.S. Supreme Court is traditionally thought to hold little influence over social or political change; however, recent evidence suggests the Court may wield significant power, especially with regard to criminal justice. Most studies evaluate judicial power by examining the effects of individual rulings on the implementation of specific policies, but this approach may overlook the broader impact of courts on society. Instead, I adopt an aggrega…
Experimental Justice
This study utilizes the random assignment of judges to panels in the U.S. courts of appeals to measure how the partisanship of these judges affects whether or not the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case and subsequently overturns the decision of the lower panel. Results from the study provide evidence of partisan behavior in the Supreme Court review process in several politically salient issue areas between 1995 and 2004. Although most lower cour…
Rethinking Regime Politics
Many recent studies of “regime politics” argue that judicial review is ultimately used to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime. I explore this claim by evaluating whether the invalidation of federal laws by the US Supreme Court fits the empirical expectations of the regime politics approach. I find that the Court frequently invalidates statutes when (1) the ideology of the Court diverges from that of the sitting elected branches…
Keeping the Outliers in Line? Judicial Review of State Laws by the U.S. Supreme Court
Objective Proponents of the “regime politics” approach argue that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to promote the interests of the dominant partisan coalition even while engaging in seemingly countermajoritarian behavior. These scholars suggest that the Court's invalidation of state laws is used to enforce a national consensus against outlier states. We argue this claim does not withstand empirical analysis. Method We employ logistic regression analy…
The Semiconstrained Court
Numerous studies have found that elite and popular preferences influence decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court; yet, uncertainty remains about when, how, and why the Court is constrained by external pressure. I argue the justices are constrained, at least in part, because they fear nonimplementation of their decisions. I test this theory by utilizing a recent study of judicial power, which finds the Court enjoys greater implementation power i…
New Data on State Supreme Court Cases
The study of U.S. state supreme courts has been significantly constrained by a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency, this article introduces an original data set of every state supreme court ruling from 1995 through 2010. We utilize automated textual analysis to search the text of thousands of state supreme court decisions and extract critical information on each case. This automated coding approach produces reliable measures of stat…
Understanding Judicial Power
High courts are widely believed to influence the criminal justice system, yet judicial impact varies widely across political and institutional contexts. Here, we seek to identify the factors that constrain judicial influence on state incarceration rates. We find that the preferences of justices on state courts of last resort and the US Supreme Court influence incarceration; however, high-court impact is conditional on two factors. Judicial influe…
Judicial Majoritarianism
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted …
Holding Steady on Shifting Sands
Empirical claims that US Supreme Court decisions tend to follow public opinion raise important questions about the countermajoritarian role of the American judiciary. Yet, for the vast majority of federal cases, the de facto court of last resort is actually a US court of appeals. We examine the role of public opinion in shaping decisions on these courts. We argue that the courts of appeals' position in the judicial hierarchy, lack of docket contr…
Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts
Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges,Journal …
Testing Judicial Power
The U.S. Supreme Court is traditionally thought to hold little influence over social or political change; however, recent evidence suggests the Court may wield significant power, especially with regard to criminal justice. Most studies evaluate judicial power by examining the effects of individual rulings on the implementation of specific policies, but this approach may overlook the broader impact of courts on society. Instead, I adopt an aggrega…
Judicial Review as a Limit on Government Domination
For centuries, politicians, activists, and academics have criticized the American system of judicial review as democratically illegitimate. In response, dozens of scholars have striven to justify the institution’s place in a democratic political system. A compelling justification for judicial review must provide a realistic description of its function and a normatively attractive understanding of that function. Unfortunately, the most prominent j…
The Role of Emotional Language in Briefs before the US Supreme Court
The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using a…
Macro Implementation
Policy implementation is usually studied at the micro level by testing the short‐term effects of a specific policy on the behavior of government actors and policy outcomes. This study adopts an alternative approach by examining macro implementation—the cumulative effect of aggregate public policies over time. I employ a variety of methodological techniques to test the influence of macro criminal justice policy on new admissions to federal prison …
Discouraging Dissent
Chief judges often strive to promote consensus in their courts to promote public confidence, durable precedents, and intracourt collegiality; yet, some chiefs succeed, whereas others fail. In this article, we identify institutional factors that facilitate and hinder the chief’s ability to promote consensus by examining dissent rates in every state court of last resort from 1995 to 2004. Consistent with prior work, we find that consensus is partia…
Holding versus Dicta
Who controls the content of the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court? Previous research offers conflicting views; however, these studies assume that a single justice exerts primary influence over the entire opinion. In contrast, we argue that different justices control holding (the legal determination that sets binding precedent) and dicta (unnecessary comments that lack precedential value). We argue that the bargaining process enables the …
Friends You Can Trust
How do interest groups influence U.S. Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of their preferred outcomes? Following prior research on the influence of the Solicitor General, we develop and expand on the signaling theory of interest group influence via amicus curie briefs. We argue that an interest group's ideological reputation and the nature of the ideological signal it sends in its brief both function as powerful heuristics that convey informa…
Considerations in Personality Measurement
In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implemen…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
The January 6th, 2025, Project
The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, can easily be viewed as a culmination of serious threats to democracy that have been building in our nation for years. I introduce this volume first by showing that the core challenges to our democracy are not new: public opinion survey data show that, for decades, 25 to 30 percent of Americans promote racial and religious hierarchies, believe conspiracies and misinformation, distrust dem…
Political plausible deniability
While many social biases are considered taboo, bias against political outgroups is increasingly explicit, ubiquitous, and tolerated. We contend that expressing political bias can reduce third-party perceptions of socially unacceptable biases-a phenomenon we call political plausible deniability . By diverting attributions away from biases based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, individuals can express bias yet ostensibly align with social no…
“Yeah, it’s biased, but … ”
Political science (19 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Supreme court (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (13 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (11 works) · Law and economics (8 works) · Sociology (8 works)