Models and Methods Commons^™

Institutional Design And The Predictability Of Judicial Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Patrick Leslie, Zoë Robinson

Faculty Articles

Examining oral argument in the Australian High Court and comparing to the U.S. Supreme Court, this article shows that institutional design drives judicial interruptive behavior. Many of the same individual- and case-level factors predict oral argument behavior. Notably, despite orthodoxy of the High Court as “apolitical,” ideology strongly predicts interruptions, just as in the United States. Yet, important divergent institutional design features between the two apex courts translate into meaningful behavioral differences, with the greater power of the Chief Justice resulting in differences in interruptions. Finally, gender effects are lower and only identifiable with new methodological techniques we develop and …

Twenty-First Century Split: Partisan, Racial, And Gender Differences In Circuit Judges Following Earlier Opinions, Stuart M. Benjamin, Byungkoo Kim, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

Judges shape the law with their votes and the reasoning in their opinions. An important element of the latter is which opinions they follow, and thus elevate, and which they cast doubt on, and thus diminish. Using a unique and comprehensive dataset containing the substantive Shepard’s treatments of all circuit court published and unpublished majority opinions issued between 1974 and 2017, we examine the relationship between judges’ substantive treatments of earlier appellate cases and their party, race, and gender. Are judges more likely to follow opinions written by colleagues of the same party, race, or gender? What we find …

Supreme Court Interruptions And Interventions: The Changing Role Of The Chief Justice, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Interruptions at Supreme Court oral argument have received much attention in recent years, particularly the disproportionate number of interruptions directed at the female Justices. The Supreme Court changed the structure of oral argument to try to address this problem. This Article assesses whether the frequency and gender disparity of interruptions of Justices improved in recent years, and whether the structural change in argument helped. It shows that interruptions decreased during the pandemic but then resurged to near-record highs, as has the gender disparity in Justice-to-Justice interruptions. However, although the rate of advocate interruptions of Justices also remains historically high, for …

Twenty-First Century Split: Partisan, Racial, And Gender Differences In Circuit Judges Following Earlier Opinions, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Kevin M. Quinn, Byungkoo Kim

Faculty Scholarship

Judges shape the law with their votes and the reasoning in their opinions. An important element of the latter is which opinions they follow, and thus elevate, and which they cast doubt on, and thus diminish. Using a unique and comprehensive dataset containing the substantive Shepard’s treatments of all circuit court published and unpublished majority opinions issued between 1974 and 2017, we examine the relationship between judges’ substantive treatments of earlier appellate cases and their party, race, and gender. Are judges more likely to follow opinions written by colleagues of the same party, race, or gender? What we find is …

Gephi Output Files, Folder 3, Part 2: Co-Citation Network Data Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Underlying Citation Data, Folder 4, Part 1: Census Of Scalia Cites, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Underlying Citation Data, Folder 4, Part 2: Census Of Thomas Cites, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Output Files, Folder 3, Part 1: Citation Network Data Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Force Directed Map Files, Folder 1, Part 1: Scalia Maps, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Force Directed Map Files, Folder 1, Part 2: Thomas Maps, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Network Files, Folder 2, Part 2: Co-Citation Network Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Network Files, Folder 2, Part 1: Citation Network Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

Gender And Judicial Decision-Making, Alexandra Just

Undergraduate Theses

This study employs a unique two-tiered approach, involving both quantitative and qualitative methodology to analyze the influences – specifically, a judge’s gender – on the judicial decision-making process. First, a quantitative bivariate regression analysis was conducted to determine whether a Federal District Court judge’s gender had a statistically significant influence on the ideological direction of case outcomes (which is either liberal, meaning the decision was in favor of the petitioner, or conservative, meaning the decision was against the petitioner). Data was analyzed using the statistical program SPSS and was pulled from the 2016 Carp-Manning database, which contains over 110,000 federal …

Partisan Voting On The California Supreme Court, Mark P. Gergen, David A. Carrillo, Benjamin M. Chen, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

When did ideology become the major fault line of the California Supreme Court? To answer this question, we use a two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model to identify voting patterns in non-unanimous decisions by California Supreme Court justices from 1910 to 2011. The model shows that voting on the court became polarized on recognizably partisan lines beginning in the mid-1900s. Justices usually did not vote in a pattern that matched their political reputations and party affiliation during the first half of the century. This began to change in the 1950s. After 1959 the dominant voting pattern is partisan and closely …

'It Wasn't Supposed To Be Easy': What The Founders Originally Intended For The Senate's 'Advice And Consent' Role For Supreme Court Confirmation Processes, Michael W. Wilt

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

The Founders exerted significant energy and passion in formulating the Appointments Clause, which greatly impacts the role of the Senate and the President in appointing Supreme Court Justices. The Founders, through their understanding of human nature, devised the power to be both a check by the U.S. Senate on the President's nomination, and a concurrent power through joint appointment authority. The Founders initially adopted the Senate election mode via state legislatures as a means of insulation from majoritarian passions of the people too. This paper seeks to understand the Founders envisioning for the Senate's 'Advice and Consent' role as it …

Judicial Choice Among Cases For Certiorari, Tonja Jacobi, Álvaro Bustos

Faculty Articles

How does the Supreme Court choose among cases to grant cert? In a model with a strategic Supreme Court, a continuum of rule-following lower courts, a set of potential cases for revision, and a distribution of future lower court cases, we show that the Court takes the case that will most significantly shape future lower court case outcomes in the direction that the Court prefers. That is, the Court grants cert to the case with maximum salience. If the Court is rather liberal (or conservative), then the most salient case is that which moves the discretionary range of the legal …

Taking Laughter Seriously At The Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Laughter in Supreme Court oral arguments has been misunderstood, treated as either a lighthearted distraction from the Court’s serious work, or interpreted as an equalizing force in an otherwise hierarchical environment. Examining the more than nine thousand instances of laughter witnessed at the Court since 1955, this Article shows that the Justices of the Supreme Court use courtroom humor as a tool of advocacy and a signal of their power and status. As the Justices have taken on a greater advocacy role in the modern era, they have also provoked more laughter.

The performative nature of courtroom humor is apparent …

Judicial Conflicts And Voting Agreement: Evidence From Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Kyle Rozema

Faculty Articles

This Article asks whether observable conflicts between Supreme Court justices—interruptions between the justices during oral arguments—can predict breakdowns in voting outcomes that occur months later. To answer this question, we built a unique dataset based on the transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments and justice votes in cases from 1960 to 2015. We find that on average a judicial pair is seven percent less likely to vote together in a case for each interruption that occurs between them in the oral argument for that case. While a conflict between the justices that leads to both interruptions and a breakdown in …

Diversity, Tenure, And Dissent, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Although academics have long recognized that institutions such as opinion-assignment procedures and voting order might influence the propensity to dissent, empirical studies have failed to consider the impact of collegiality and personal relationships on dissent rates. Thus, in this short Essay, I empirically test whether some of the judges’ assertions are consistent with the data. I test whether various measures of diversity are associated with dissent rates in state supreme courts. I find that diversity in many areas—gender, race, age, religion, home state, and political affiliation—is associated with higher levels of dissent. In contrast, diversity in the jobs that judges …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …

The Long Shadow Of Bush V. Gore: Judicial Partisanship In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election and is the most dramatic election case in our lifetime, but cases like it are decided every year at the state level. Ordinary state courts regularly decide questions of election rules and administration that effectively determine electoral outcomes hanging immediately in the balance. Election cases like Bush v. Gore embody a fundamental worry with judicial intervention into the political process: outcome-driven, partisan judicial decisionmaking. The Article investigates whether judges decide cases, particularly politically sensitive ones, based on their partisan loyalties more than the legal merits of the cases. It presents a novel method …

Courtroom To Classroom: Judicial Policymaking And Affirmative Action, Dylan Britton Saul

Political Science Honors Projects

The judicial branch, by exercising judicial review, can replace public policies with ones of their own creation. To test the hypothesis that judicial policymaking is desirable only when courts possess high capacity and necessity, I propose an original model incorporating six variables: generalism, bi-polarity, minimalism, legitimization, structural impediments, and public support. Applying the model to a comparative case study of court-sanctioned affirmative action policies in higher education and K-12 public schools, I find that a lack of structural impediments and bi-polarity limits the desirability of judicial race-based remedies in education. Courts must restrain themselves when engaging in such policymaking.

An Evaluation Of Cross-National Measures Of Judicial Independence, Julio Ríos-Figueroa, Jeffrey K. Staton

Julio Ríos-Figueroa

We provide a conceptual map of judicial independence and evaluate the con- tent, construct, and convergent validity of 13 cross-national measures. There is evidence suggesting the validity of extant de facto measures, though their proper use requires attention to correlated patterns of measurement error and missing data. The evidence for the validity of extant de jure measures is weaker. Among other findings, we do not observe a strong and direct link between the rules that allegedly promote judicial independence and independent behavior. The results suggest that while the measurement of both de jure and de facto judicial independence requires a …

El Tribunal De Los Militantes: El Control Judicial De Los Conflictos Intrapartidistas En México, Javier Martín Reyes

Javier Martín Reyes

The Party Members’ Court: Judicial Control over Intraparty Disputes in Mexico.

This paper explains how the Electoral Court of the Federal Judicial Branch (TEPJF) of Mexico, without a supporting legislation, was able to establish a direct and far reaching control over intraparty disputes such as the election of party leaders, the selection of candidates, or the punishment of party members. Following a strategic behavior approach, I will provide empirical evidence to prove that there was a negative correlation between the level of judicial control over the parties’ internal life, on the one hand, and the vulnerability of the TEPJF from …

Unanswered Questions Of A Minority People In International Law: A Comparative Study Between Southern Cameroons & South Sudan, Bernard Sama Mr

Bernard Sama

The month July of 2011 marked the birth of another nation in the World. The distressful journey of a minority people under the watchful eyes of the international community finally paid off with a new nation called the South Sudan . As I watched the South Sudanese celebrate independence on 9 July 2011, I was filled with joy as though they have finally landed. On a promising note, I read the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon saying “[t]ogether, we welcome the Republic of South Sudan to the community of nations. Together, we affirm our commitment to helping it meet its …

Judging Women, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Mirya R. Holman, Eric A. Posner

Mirya R Holman

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be better than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. For many of our tests, we fail to find significant gender effects on judicial performance. Where we do find significant gender effects for …

Gender And Regime Politics In U.S. Cities, Mirya R. Holman

Mirya R Holman

The scholarship on urban politics often focuses on the political economy provided by regimes, or long-term coalitions between local politicians and private actors like the business community. Notably absent from the regime scholarship is any substantial investigation of the role that urban regimes play in the promotion of the interests of women living in urban areas. A comparison of the priorities of urban regimes with the interests of women in politics suggests substantial conflicts. The implications for women serving in urban governance are explored, as are the consequences for urban politics, women in politics, and democracy.

Evaluating Political And Environmental Behavior In The Face Of A Green Crisis: An Experimental Analysis, Mirya R. Holman, Travis G. Coan

Mirya R Holman

Incidents such as the Japanese Nuclear Meltdowns and the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico remind us that environmental issues can be central to activating political activity and influencing political opinions. While the literature suggesting a relationship between environmental risk and action is extensive, few scholars directly examine the relationship between perceived environmental threat and political behavior, and even fewer adopt research designs appropriate for making causal inferences. Building on a growing literature in political psychology that examines the effects of crises and emotions on political opinions, we examine the relationship between environmental threat and political behavior …