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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 support for term limits is a function of his or her subjective ideological agreement with the Supreme Court. Finally, we demonstrate that although support for term limits is generally high, only a modest subset of reform supporters believe that term limits should be a top political priority. These supporters also tend to exhibit weaker levels of support for the rule of law more generally. Taken together, the results contribute to our understanding of an issue of significant importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress' efforts to limit federal courts' jurisdiction are principally related to courts' workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inquiry by testing the hypothesis of a negative relationship between public support for the Supreme Court and jurisdiction-stripping legislation. Contrary to prior studies, the authors find a positive relationship between Americans' confidence in the Supreme Court and jurisdiction stripping. This result indicates the need for additional research on the interactions among public opinion, federal courts, and Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowing where legal complaints arise can tell us something about them and reveal clues about their conditions of origin. In this paper, we examine the geographic origins of litigation challenging the boundaries of electoral districts—an increasingly salient and prominent source of political conflict. We construct an original dataset of all redistricting cases in state and federal courts nationwide, from 1960 to 2019. We show that redistricting litigation surfaces not just in states where there are regions undergoing rapid population change or that have a greater proportion of aggrieved racial minority groups but also in areas where there is close partisan competition. The filing of redistricting litigation is highly responsive to hypercompetitive political environments, suggesting that parties pursue judicial intervention vigorously when political power hangs in the balance and not simply due to demographic changes associated with decennial population measurement. These findings have important implications for understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of redistricting politics and the consequences of intense partisan electoral competition in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 number of important methodological deficits that critically limit their usefulness. We briefly discuss what kinds of improved personality measures scholars should use instead and offer an improved set of estimates for one trait with an application that demonstrates our cautionary tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We examine media incentives shaping the nature of U.S. Supreme Court justices' news coverage and, in particular, how those incentives often lead news outlets to concentrate coverage on particular justices on the Court. Methods: First, we examine and model aggregate, over time patterns of news attention devoted to individual justices in the New York Times over the past four decades. Second, we compare and model temporal variation in individual justice coverage relative to generic coverage of the Supreme Court. Findings: The results suggest that particular justices receive disproportionate attention from the national news media. Further, we demonstrate how individual justices have received a greater proportion of print media coverage over time and in a way that is shaped by internal division among the justices. Conclusion: The findings provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of how national media utilize resources to maximize journalistic impact and personalize the Court as an institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 support. The data suggest that circuit court judges may change along with society but also that they follow public opinion because they care about their reputations in their home states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 judges with greater past elected political experience may be more responsive. The results have implications for democratic control of the unelected judiciary, and suggest that appointing judges with electoral experience could, for better or worse, lead to a more majoritarian judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the opinions and audiences of the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court Justices write opinions to explain their legal conclusions. It mentions a book "U.S. Supreme Court Opinions and Their Audiences" which examines this "audience effect" on the Supreme Court and how personal goals might also influence how judges and Justices behave. It mentions correlation between measure and human's rating of its readability.

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 individual-level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue-specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers' policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 win their cases compared to other kinds of state attorneys. Accordingly, if states prioritize victory before the Court, they should consider creating state solicitor general offices and granting those solicitors general the authority to control their appellate litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Supreme Court’s most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice’s resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on the Court. Second, we argue that the swing justice will typically rely less on attitudinal considerations and more on strategic and legal considerations than the other justices on the Court. The analysis suggests that even among the Court’s most closely divided decisions, which are typically thought to reflect the Court’s most ideologically driven outcomes, the pivotal swing vote is significantly less likely to reflect attitudinal predispositions and more likely to reflect strategic considerations, such as the public’s preferences, and case-specific considerations such as the position advocated by the Solicitor General. The theory and findings suggest that a failure to consider the unique behavior of a pivotal actor—whether on the Supreme Court or any other decision-making body—can lead to incorrect conclusions about the determinants of policy outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion. We then propose a theoretical argument that predicts strategic justices should be mindful of public opinion even in cases when the public is unlikely to be aware of the Court's activities. The results suggest that the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions is real, substantively important, and most pronounced in nonsalient cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of courts will be a function of public confidence in the legislature as well as evaluations of the judiciary. We test this theory, finding that public confidence in both Congress and the Court significantly affect congressional support for the Supreme Court, controlling for the ideological distance between the Court and Congress as well as the Court's workload. The results offer a more refined and complex view of the role of public sentiment in balancing institutional power in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous scholarly accounts of the solicitor general's (S.G.) influence on the U.S. Supreme Court emphasize either the office's role as an ideological advocate for the executive branch or its reputation as a resource for credible legal information. Yet existing empirical analyses do not fully examine the potential that political advocacy of executive policy might undermine the S.G.'s influence. I propose a theory investigating the degree to which perceptual political bias jeopardizes the solicitor general's credibility as a trustworthy informational source. I argue that the Court should discount the S.G.'s arguments when the office exhibits excessive politicization. I test my assertion using individual-level data spanning the 1961-2003 Court terms. The data reveal that excessive politicization jeopardizes success on the merits, thereby demonstrating a systematic, negative impact on the office's legal influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]