Ryan J Owens
Biographic Data
| ID | 3846258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryan J Owens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ryan J |
| FAMILY NAME | Owens |
| SIGNATURE | OWENS R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0097-4350 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 386 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
How the Intensity of Preference for Ideological Judges Influences Court Support
Recent research shows that many people support courts based on their ideological congruence with those courts and their decisions. But people likely hold varying degrees of intensity in their preferences for judges who will implement conservative or liberal policy. We suspect that court support is a function of that intensity. Our results agree. Court support turns on the intensity with which people prefer conservative, moderate, or liberal judge…
Televised Oral Arguments and Judicial Legitimacy: An Initial Assessment
Order effects and oral argument at the US Supreme Court
Objective For years, scholars have employed Justice Harry Blackmun's private grades of attorneys to measure attorney oral argument quality. Using archival data, I analyze whether Justice Blackmun experienced order effects. Methods I estimate numerous ordinary least squares regression models on private archival data. Results Blackmun's respondent grades appear to have been influenced by his perceptions of how the petitioners performed. This findin…
Judicial Philosophy and the Public’s Support for Courts
How do Americans’ preferences over judicial philosophy influence their support for judges and judicial decisions? Using an experiment attached to an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that people hold preferences over judicial philosophies, that they rely on those preferences to evaluate judges and decisions, and that those preferences are not simply stand-ins for ideology and partisanship. These findings suggest that to understand …
Considering Constitutional Change: Survey Evidence on Public Attitudes Toward Term Limits for Federal Judges
This article analyzes public attitudes toward replacing lifetime tenure with term limits for federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. We employ novel data that we collected from a nationwide survey experiment. We find that although partisans are less supportive of proposals from their opponents, the magnitude of this effect is much smaller than one might expect in today’s polarized environment. We also find that a respondent’s suppo…
How State Judicial Selection Methods May Influence Views of US Supreme Court Nominees: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
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…
On Estimating Personality Traits of US Supreme Court Justices
Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a nu…
Trends: The Influence of Personalized Knowledge at the Supreme Court: How (Some) Former Law Clerks Have the Inside Track
When arguing at the U.S. Supreme Court, former High Court law clerks enjoy significant influence over their former justices. Our analysis of forty years of judicial votes reveals that an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 16 percent more likely to capture that justice’s vote than an otherwise identical attorney who never clerked. What is more, an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 14 to 16 percent more likely to capture th…
Public Support for Judicial Philosophies: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
We examine whether the public evaluates Supreme Court nominees on the basis of judicial philosophies when presented with a description of those philosophies. Employing a conjoint experiment, we find that the public will evaluate nominees’ judicial philosophies as well as the nominees’ partisanship, ideology, and qualifications. We also discover significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. These results have important implications fo…
The Influence of Home-State Reputation and Public Opinion on Federal Circuit Court Judges
At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data…
How Supreme Court Justices Supervise Ideologically Distant States
Because the Supreme Court can decide only so many cases per term, justices carefully target which cases they hear and which parties they supervise. We focus on their decisions to hear cases involving states as parties. We believe justices use the agenda power to target states with whom they disagree ideologically. Granting review allows justices to keep an eye on wayward states and to remind them of the ever-present threat of Supreme Court review…
Public Mood, Previous Electoral Experience, and Responsiveness Among Federal Circuit Court Judges
Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that …
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…
Courting the President: How Circuit Court Judges Alter Their Behavior for Promotion to the Supreme Court
We examine whether circuit court judges sacrifice policy purity for career goals. We compare the behavior of contender judges–those most likely to be elevated to the Supreme Court–during vacancy periods with their behavior outside vacancy periods. We also examine the behavior of noncontender judges during those same times. The data show that during vacancy periods, contender judges are more likely to vote consistently with the president's prefere…
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to w…
Qualifications or Philosophy? The Use of Blue Slips in a Polarized Era
In recent years, judicial nominations to lower federal courts have been blocked privately by negative blue slips returned by home state senators. We examine the conditions under which senators return negative blue slips and discover two results. First, consistent with existing work, ideology plays a strong role in blue slipping. Second, and more important, we find that nominee qualifications mitigate ideological extremism—but only for district co…
We Are the World: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Sources of Law
The United States Supreme Court recently employed foreign legal sources to interpret U.S. law, provoking widespread political and legal controversy. Scholars have yet to examine systematically the conditions under which justices cite foreign law, however. Applying theoretical approaches from international relations and judicial politics scholarship, we search every Supreme Court opinion between 1953 and 2009 for references to foreign law. Justice…
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
Bargaining and Legal Development in the United States Courts of Appeals
Examining the systematic and private records of a former D.C. Circuit Court Judge, we examine the process by which federal circuit court judges craft legal opinions. We discover that private and contextual factors influence legal outcomes. More specifically, we find that workload considerations strongly influence circuit opinions, that some visiting and senior judges effect the process differently than do active circuit court judges, and that pan…
A Built-In Advantage: The Office of the Solicitor General and the U.S. Supreme Court
The Office of the Solicitor General wins the vast majority of Supreme Court cases in which it participates. Does it enjoy a built-in advantage, or does it win because it employs experienced litigators, enjoys resource advantages, or carries the executive’s sword? To answer these questions, we employ cutting edge matching methods. After matching OSG lawyers with nearly identical non-OSG lawyers in nearly identical cases, we find that OSG attorneys…
The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Branch Influence and Judicial Decisions
The United States government, represented by the Office of the Solicitor General, appears before the Supreme Court more than any other litigant. The Office's link to the president, the arguments it makes before the Court and its ability to alter the legal and policy landscape make it the most important Supreme Court litigant bar none. As such, scholars must understand the Office's role in Supreme Court decision making and its ability to influence…
Predicting Drift on Politically Insulated Institutions: A Study of Ideological Drift on the United States Supreme Court
Elected officials have difficulty controlling politically insulated institutions, leaving the appointment process as perhaps their most effective means of influence. Yet, history shows that actors on these institutions—especially the Supreme Court—often behave unpredictably. Our goal is to determine whether variation in two components of cognitive style, prior to a justice’s nomination to the Court, predicts ideological drift once on the Court. U…
Consider the Source (and the Message): Supreme Court Justices and Strategic Audits of Lower Court Decisions
Given scarce resources, Supreme Court justices hear cases that maximize their auditing capacities. The authors argue that justices rely on the identity of lower court judges and the ideological disposition of lower court decisions to decide which cases to review. The authors find justices are most likely to audit disagreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically disagreeable panel judges and are least likely to review agreeable lower c…
Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not pr…
The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting
This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every mode…
Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence
For decades, scholars have searched for data to show that Supreme Court justices are influenced not only by policy goals but also by legal considerations. Analyzing justices ’ agenda-setting decisions, we show that while justices are largely motivated by policy concerns, jurisprudential considerations can prevail over their policy goals. When policy goals and legal considerations collide, policy gives way. If legal considerations and policy goals…
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
Adding Recess Appointments to the President's “Tool Chest” of Unilateral Powers
In the struggle to control the federal bureaucracy, presidents have an overlooked but powerful tool: the recess appointment. By making recess appointments, presidents can fill vacancies without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors delineate three conditions that define presidential unilateral powers and demonstrate how recess appointments fit within that paradigm. Presidents, the authors argue, should be more likely to make recess ap…
Solicitor General Influence and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
Do Solicitors General (SGs) influence how justices vote? Years of scholarship suggests that the answer is yes but has largely failed to examine what influence means and just how much influence the SG wields. The authors examine SG influence during the Court’s agenda-setting stage. They find, first, that justices follow SG recommendations even when they are completely opposed to them and, second, that law exerts a strong independent influence. Jus…
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
A Built-In Advantage: The Office of the Solicitor General and the U.S. Supreme Court
The Office of the Solicitor General wins the vast majority of Supreme Court cases in which it participates. Does it enjoy a built-in advantage, or does it win because it employs experienced litigators, enjoys resource advantages, or carries the executive’s sword? To answer these questions, we employ cutting edge matching methods. After matching OSG lawyers with nearly identical non-OSG lawyers in nearly identical cases, we find that OSG attorneys…
Predicting Drift on Politically Insulated Institutions: A Study of Ideological Drift on the United States Supreme Court
Elected officials have difficulty controlling politically insulated institutions, leaving the appointment process as perhaps their most effective means of influence. Yet, history shows that actors on these institutions—especially the Supreme Court—often behave unpredictably. Our goal is to determine whether variation in two components of cognitive style, prior to a justice’s nomination to the Court, predicts ideological drift once on the Court. U…
Courting the President: How Circuit Court Judges Alter Their Behavior for Promotion to the Supreme Court
We examine whether circuit court judges sacrifice policy purity for career goals. We compare the behavior of contender judges–those most likely to be elevated to the Supreme Court–during vacancy periods with their behavior outside vacancy periods. We also examine the behavior of noncontender judges during those same times. The data show that during vacancy periods, contender judges are more likely to vote consistently with the president's prefere…
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…
Public Support for Judicial Philosophies: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
We examine whether the public evaluates Supreme Court nominees on the basis of judicial philosophies when presented with a description of those philosophies. Employing a conjoint experiment, we find that the public will evaluate nominees’ judicial philosophies as well as the nominees’ partisanship, ideology, and qualifications. We also discover significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. These results have important implications fo…
Consider the Source (and the Message): Supreme Court Justices and Strategic Audits of Lower Court Decisions
Given scarce resources, Supreme Court justices hear cases that maximize their auditing capacities. The authors argue that justices rely on the identity of lower court judges and the ideological disposition of lower court decisions to decide which cases to review. The authors find justices are most likely to audit disagreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically disagreeable panel judges and are least likely to review agreeable lower c…
Assessing Congressional Responses to Growing Presidential Powers: The Case of Recess Appointments
In 2007, the U.S. Senate moved into permanent session to stop President George W. Bush from making recess appointments. This article examines this episode. We argue that Congress is only able to effectively check presidential unilateral powers when the president's use of such powers creates high political costs for a sufficient number of members such that congressional collective action is possible. Using case studies and multivariate analysis, w…
Looking Back to Move Forward: Quantifying Policy Predictions in Political Decision Making
Policy makers constantly face uncertainty, which makes achieving their goals problematic. To overcome this uncertainty, they employ tools to drive down uncertainty and make probabilistic decisions. We provide a method for scholars to assess empirically how actors make probabilistic predictions. We focus on the interactions between the executive and judicial branches, analyzing the conditions under which justices force the United States to provide…
Trends: The Influence of Personalized Knowledge at the Supreme Court: How (Some) Former Law Clerks Have the Inside Track
When arguing at the U.S. Supreme Court, former High Court law clerks enjoy significant influence over their former justices. Our analysis of forty years of judicial votes reveals that an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 16 percent more likely to capture that justice’s vote than an otherwise identical attorney who never clerked. What is more, an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 14 to 16 percent more likely to capture th…
Televised Oral Arguments and Judicial Legitimacy: An Initial Assessment
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
We Are the World: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Sources of Law
The United States Supreme Court recently employed foreign legal sources to interpret U.S. law, provoking widespread political and legal controversy. Scholars have yet to examine systematically the conditions under which justices cite foreign law, however. Applying theoretical approaches from international relations and judicial politics scholarship, we search every Supreme Court opinion between 1953 and 2009 for references to foreign law. Justice…
Judicial Philosophy and the Public’s Support for Courts
How do Americans’ preferences over judicial philosophy influence their support for judges and judicial decisions? Using an experiment attached to an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that people hold preferences over judicial philosophies, that they rely on those preferences to evaluate judges and decisions, and that those preferences are not simply stand-ins for ideology and partisanship. These findings suggest that to understand …
Qualifications or Philosophy? The Use of Blue Slips in a Polarized Era
In recent years, judicial nominations to lower federal courts have been blocked privately by negative blue slips returned by home state senators. We examine the conditions under which senators return negative blue slips and discover two results. First, consistent with existing work, ideology plays a strong role in blue slipping. Second, and more important, we find that nominee qualifications mitigate ideological extremism—but only for district co…
Considering Constitutional Change: Survey Evidence on Public Attitudes Toward Term Limits for Federal Judges
This article analyzes public attitudes toward replacing lifetime tenure with term limits for federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. We employ novel data that we collected from a nationwide survey experiment. We find that although partisans are less supportive of proposals from their opponents, the magnitude of this effect is much smaller than one might expect in today’s polarized environment. We also find that a respondent’s suppo…
How State Judicial Selection Methods May Influence Views of US Supreme Court Nominees: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
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…
How the Intensity of Preference for Ideological Judges Influences Court Support
Recent research shows that many people support courts based on their ideological congruence with those courts and their decisions. But people likely hold varying degrees of intensity in their preferences for judges who will implement conservative or liberal policy. We suspect that court support is a function of that intensity. Our results agree. Court support turns on the intensity with which people prefer conservative, moderate, or liberal judge…
Bargaining and Legal Development in the United States Courts of Appeals
Examining the systematic and private records of a former D.C. Circuit Court Judge, we examine the process by which federal circuit court judges craft legal opinions. We discover that private and contextual factors influence legal outcomes. More specifically, we find that workload considerations strongly influence circuit opinions, that some visiting and senior judges effect the process differently than do active circuit court judges, and that pan…
Adding Recess Appointments to the President's “Tool Chest” of Unilateral Powers
In the struggle to control the federal bureaucracy, presidents have an overlooked but powerful tool: the recess appointment. By making recess appointments, presidents can fill vacancies without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors delineate three conditions that define presidential unilateral powers and demonstrate how recess appointments fit within that paradigm. Presidents, the authors argue, should be more likely to make recess ap…
Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence
For decades, scholars have searched for data to show that Supreme Court justices are influenced not only by policy goals but also by legal considerations. Analyzing justices ’ agenda-setting decisions, we show that while justices are largely motivated by policy concerns, jurisprudential considerations can prevail over their policy goals. When policy goals and legal considerations collide, policy gives way. If legal considerations and policy goals…
Solicitor General Influence and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
Do Solicitors General (SGs) influence how justices vote? Years of scholarship suggests that the answer is yes but has largely failed to examine what influence means and just how much influence the SG wields. The authors examine SG influence during the Court’s agenda-setting stage. They find, first, that justices follow SG recommendations even when they are completely opposed to them and, second, that law exerts a strong independent influence. Jus…
The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting
This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every mode…
Assessing Congressional Responses to Growing Presidential Powers: The Case of Recess Appointments
In 2007, the U.S. Senate moved into permanent session to stop President George W. Bush from making recess appointments. This article examines this episode. We argue that Congress is only able to effectively check presidential unilateral powers when the president's use of such powers creates high political costs for a sufficient number of members such that congressional collective action is possible. Using case studies and multivariate analysis, w…
Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not pr…
The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Branch Influence and Judicial Decisions
The United States government, represented by the Office of the Solicitor General, appears before the Supreme Court more than any other litigant. The Office's link to the president, the arguments it makes before the Court and its ability to alter the legal and policy landscape make it the most important Supreme Court litigant bar none. As such, scholars must understand the Office's role in Supreme Court decision making and its ability to influence…
Predicting Drift on Politically Insulated Institutions: A Study of Ideological Drift on the United States Supreme Court
Elected officials have difficulty controlling politically insulated institutions, leaving the appointment process as perhaps their most effective means of influence. Yet, history shows that actors on these institutions—especially the Supreme Court—often behave unpredictably. Our goal is to determine whether variation in two components of cognitive style, prior to a justice’s nomination to the Court, predicts ideological drift once on the Court. U…
Consider the Source (and the Message): Supreme Court Justices and Strategic Audits of Lower Court Decisions
Given scarce resources, Supreme Court justices hear cases that maximize their auditing capacities. The authors argue that justices rely on the identity of lower court judges and the ideological disposition of lower court decisions to decide which cases to review. The authors find justices are most likely to audit disagreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically disagreeable panel judges and are least likely to review agreeable lower c…
Looking Back to Move Forward: Quantifying Policy Predictions in Political Decision Making
Policy makers constantly face uncertainty, which makes achieving their goals problematic. To overcome this uncertainty, they employ tools to drive down uncertainty and make probabilistic decisions. We provide a method for scholars to assess empirically how actors make probabilistic predictions. We focus on the interactions between the executive and judicial branches, analyzing the conditions under which justices force the United States to provide…
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
Bargaining and Legal Development in the United States Courts of Appeals
Examining the systematic and private records of a former D.C. Circuit Court Judge, we examine the process by which federal circuit court judges craft legal opinions. We discover that private and contextual factors influence legal outcomes. More specifically, we find that workload considerations strongly influence circuit opinions, that some visiting and senior judges effect the process differently than do active circuit court judges, and that pan…
A Built-In Advantage: The Office of the Solicitor General and the U.S. Supreme Court
The Office of the Solicitor General wins the vast majority of Supreme Court cases in which it participates. Does it enjoy a built-in advantage, or does it win because it employs experienced litigators, enjoys resource advantages, or carries the executive’s sword? To answer these questions, we employ cutting edge matching methods. After matching OSG lawyers with nearly identical non-OSG lawyers in nearly identical cases, we find that OSG attorneys…
State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to w…
Qualifications or Philosophy? The Use of Blue Slips in a Polarized Era
In recent years, judicial nominations to lower federal courts have been blocked privately by negative blue slips returned by home state senators. We examine the conditions under which senators return negative blue slips and discover two results. First, consistent with existing work, ideology plays a strong role in blue slipping. Second, and more important, we find that nominee qualifications mitigate ideological extremism—but only for district co…
We Are the World: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Sources of Law
The United States Supreme Court recently employed foreign legal sources to interpret U.S. law, provoking widespread political and legal controversy. Scholars have yet to examine systematically the conditions under which justices cite foreign law, however. Applying theoretical approaches from international relations and judicial politics scholarship, we search every Supreme Court opinion between 1953 and 2009 for references to foreign law. Justice…
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
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…
Courting the President: How Circuit Court Judges Alter Their Behavior for Promotion to the Supreme Court
We examine whether circuit court judges sacrifice policy purity for career goals. We compare the behavior of contender judges–those most likely to be elevated to the Supreme Court–during vacancy periods with their behavior outside vacancy periods. We also examine the behavior of noncontender judges during those same times. The data show that during vacancy periods, contender judges are more likely to vote consistently with the president's prefere…
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
How Supreme Court Justices Supervise Ideologically Distant States
Because the Supreme Court can decide only so many cases per term, justices carefully target which cases they hear and which parties they supervise. We focus on their decisions to hear cases involving states as parties. We believe justices use the agenda power to target states with whom they disagree ideologically. Granting review allows justices to keep an eye on wayward states and to remind them of the ever-present threat of Supreme Court review…
Public Mood, Previous Electoral Experience, and Responsiveness Among Federal Circuit Court Judges
Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that …
The Influence of Home-State Reputation and Public Opinion on Federal Circuit Court Judges
At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data…
Public Support for Judicial Philosophies: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
We examine whether the public evaluates Supreme Court nominees on the basis of judicial philosophies when presented with a description of those philosophies. Employing a conjoint experiment, we find that the public will evaluate nominees’ judicial philosophies as well as the nominees’ partisanship, ideology, and qualifications. We also discover significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. These results have important implications fo…
How State Judicial Selection Methods May Influence Views of US Supreme Court Nominees: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
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…
Law (32 works) · Political science (32 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Supreme court (23 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (20 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Economics (10 works)