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Institutional Design And The Predictability Of Judicial Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Patrick Leslie, Zoë Robinson
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 …
Judicial Conflicts And Voting Agreement: Evidence From Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Kyle Rozema
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 …