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Full-Text Articles in Law and Politics
Political Ideology And Judicial Administration: Evidence From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kyle Rozema, Adam Chilton, Christopher Anthony Cotropia, David L. Schwartz
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 …
Deliberation's Demise: The Rise Of One-Party Rule In The Senate, Kathleen Clark, Tiefer Charles
Deliberation's Demise: The Rise Of One-Party Rule In The Senate, Kathleen Clark, Tiefer Charles
Scholarship@WashULaw
Much of the recent legal scholarship on the Senate expresses concern about gridlock, which was caused in part by the Senate’s supermajority requirement to pass legislation and confirm presidential nominees. This scholarship exalted the value of procedural changes permitting the majority party to push through legislation and confirmations, and failed to appreciate salutary aspects of the supermajority requirement: that it provided a key structural support for stability and balance in governance. The Senate changed its rules in order to address the problem of partisan gridlock, and now a party with a bare majority is able to force through much of …