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Judges

Washington University in St. Louis

Judicial Behavior

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Endgame Of Court-Packing, Kyle Rozema, Daniel Epps, Adam Chilton, Maya Sen Jan 2023

The Endgame Of Court-Packing, Kyle Rozema, Daniel Epps, Adam Chilton, Maya Sen

Scholarship@WashULaw

At several points in history, politicians and commentators have proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court to accomplish partisan ends. We explore the incentives for a political party to initiate “court-packing” and what the Supreme Court would look like in a world where political parties engage in repeated partisan court- packing. To do so, we use an Agent-Based Model and different data sources to calibrate the behaviors of Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Court justices. We then simulate the future composition of the Court in worlds with and without court-packing. The simulations suggest that a political party with an initial minority …


Political Ideology And Judicial Administration: Evidence From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kyle Rozema, Adam Chilton, Christopher Anthony Cotropia, David L. Schwartz Jan 2022

Political Ideology And Judicial Administration: Evidence From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kyle Rozema, Adam Chilton, Christopher Anthony Cotropia, David L. Schwartz

Scholarship@WashULaw

We study the effect of political ideology on the administration of the judiciary by investigating how the chief judges of federal district courts set courthouse policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we use novel data on the geographic boundaries of federal courts and on the contents of pandemic orders. We account for state and local conditions and policies by leveraging district courts in states that have multiple judicial districts and that have courthouses in multiple counties, and we isolate the effect of chief ideology by using simulations that difference out unobserved district-level effects. We find no …