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At the intersection of behavioral and institutional studies of policy making lie a series of questions about how elite choices affect mass public opinion. Scholars have considered how judicial decisions—especially US Supreme Court decisions—affect individuals’ support for specific policy positions. These studies yield a series of competing findings. Whereas past research uses opinion surveys to assess how individuals’ opinions are shaped, we believe that modern techniques for analyzing social media provide analytic leverage that traditional approaches do not offer. We present a framework for employing Twitter data to study mass opinion discourse. We find that the Supreme Court’s decisions relating to same-sex marriage in 2013 had significant effects on how the public discussed same-sex marriage and had a polarizing effect on mass opinion. We conclude by connecting these findings and our analyses to larger problems and debates in the area of democratic deliberation and big-data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideal point estimation in political science usually aims to reduce a matrix of votes to a small number of preference dimensions. We argue that taking a nonparametric perspective can yield measures that are more useful for some subsequent analyses. We propose a conditional autoregressive preference measurement model, which we use to generate case-specific preference estimates for US Supreme Court justices from 1946 to 2005. We show that the varying relative legal positions taken by justices across areas of law condition the opinion assignment strategy of the chief justice and the decisions of all justices as to whether to join the majority opinion. Unlike previous analyses that have made similar claims, using case-specific preference estimates enables us to hold constant the justices involved, providing stronger evidence that justices are strategically responsive to each others' relative positions on a case-by-case basis rather than simply their identities or average relative preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the public often relies on cues or heuristics when forming opinions. At the same time, leading theories of opinion formation about the Supreme Court see such support as relatively fixed. Using a series of survey experiments, we find source cues significantly influence the public’s support for the Court, including the extent to which individuals believe the Court should be independent from the elected branches. Specifically, we find partisan source cues play a significant role in shaping public opinion regarding life tenure for the justices and the extent to which the Court should have the final say in constitutional matters—individuals are less likely to support court-curbing measures when informed that elites from the opposite party have proposed them than when such measures are endorsed by either a neutral source or members of their own party. We also find a strong connection between specific support for particular decisions and the degree to which people believe the Court should be free from external influence, as individuals are more likely to say the justices should be influenced by demonstrators when the side they favor is the one doing the demonstrating. These results have important implications for understanding the extent to which politicians can shape the public’s overall support for the Court, as well as for assessing the degree to which the public views the Court as a “political” institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but decisions themselves are an act of judicial politics. Because this coverage measure is affected only after a decision is announced, using it limits the types of inferences we can draw about salience. We develop a measure of latent salience, one that builds on existing work, but that also explicitly incorporates and models predecision information. This measure has the potential to ameliorate concerns of causal inference, put research findings on sounder footing, and add to our understanding of judicial behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Item response theory models for roll-call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which those votes are about common issues. We demonstrate our approach with votes and opinion texts from the U.S. Supreme Court, using latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the extent to which different issues were at stake in different cases and estimating justice preferences within each of those issues. This approach can be applied using a variety of unsupervised and supervised topic models for text, community detection models for networks, or any other tool capable of generating discrete or mixture categorization of subject matter from relevant vote-specific metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how the Supreme Court learns from lower court decisions to evaluate new legal issues. We present a theory of optimal stopping in which the Court learns from successive rulings on new issues by lower courts but incurs a cost when lower courts come into conflict with one another. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about a new legal issue and intervening to end a costly conflict between the lower courts. We evaluate how factors such as the quality of lower courts, the distribution of judicial preferences, and the timing of the emergence of conflict affect how the Court weighs this trade-off. We provide empirical evidence that supports one of the theory’s novel predictions: the Court should be more likely to end a conflict immediately when it emerges after several lower courts have already weighed in on a new legal issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Principal-agent relations are replete in politics; politicians are agents of electorates, bureaucrats are agents of executives, lower courts are agents of upper courts, and much more. Commonly, principals are modeled as the rule-making body and agents as the rule-implementing body. However, principals often delegate the authority to make the rules themselves to their agents. The relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court is one such example; a considerable portion of the law (rules) is made in the lower federal courts with the Supreme Court serving primarily as the overseer of those lower courts’ decisions. In this article, we develop and test a principal-agent model of law (rule) creation in a judicial hierarchy. The model yields new insights about the relationship among various features of the judicial hierarchy that run against many existing perceptions. For example, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the divergence in upper and lower court preferences over rules and the likelihood of review and reversal by the Supreme Court. The empirical evidence supports these derived relationships. Wider implications for the principal-agent literature are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many theories of judicial politics have at their core the concepts of legal significance, doctrinal development and evolution, and the dynamics of precedent. Despite rigorous theoretical conceptualization, these concepts remain empirically elusive. We propose the use of a genealogical model (or "family tree") to describe the Court's construction of precedent over time. We describe statistical assumptions that allow us to estimate this kind of structure using an original data set of citation counts between Supreme Court majority opinions. The genealogical model of doctrinal development provides a parsimonious description of the dependencies between opinions, while generating measures of legal significance and other related quantities. We employ these measures to evaluate the robustness of a recent finding concerning the relationship between ideological homogeneity within majority coalitions and the legal impact of Court decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search and seizure and freedom of religion opinions written between 1953 and 2006 into these different types and develop a model relating the similarity of the doctrine embodied in the citing and cited opinions to the relative probability of these different types of citations. The resulting spatial estimates of opinion location are used to evaluate theories of Supreme Court bargaining and opinion writing. We find empirical support for theoretical models that predict the majority opinion will fall at the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition. Given the centrality of theories of judicial policymaking to various substantive problems in political science, the method of scaling opinions developed in this article can facilitate a range of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major focus of judicial politics research has been the extent to which ideological divergence between the Court and Congress can explain variation in Supreme Court decision making. However, conflicting theoretical and empirical findings have given rise to a significant discrepancy in the scholarship. Building on evidence from interviews with Supreme Court justices and former law clerks, I develop a formal model of judicial-congressional relations that incorporates judicial preferences for institutional legitimacy and the role of public opinion in congressional hostility towards the Supreme Court. An original dataset identifying all Court-curbing legislation proposed between 1877 and 2006 is then used to assess the influence of congressional hostility on the Court's use of judicial review. The evidence indicates that public discontent with the Court, as mediated through congressional hostility, creates an incentive for the Court to exercise self-restraint. When Congress is hostile, the Court uses judicial review to invalidate Acts of Congress less frequently than when Congress is not hostile towards the Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of ideological polarization is an important topic in research ranging from behavioral-level to institutional studies of politics. Polarization, however, has received little attention in the context of the Supreme Court, even while popular press and legal commentary suggest ideological heterogeneity on the Court is consequential for the Court's policy outputs. In this article, I apply an axiomatic measure of polarization developed by Esteban and Ray (1994) to study ideological heterogeneity on the Court to develop a "polarization statistic." I compare this method with other common polarization measures and provide evidence for the reliability of the measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Tom C. Clark, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, delivered at the 1960 Mid-Winter Meeting of the National District Attorney's Association. I plead guilty to still being one of the family of those who preach and practice strict law enforcement. The organized law breaker is our most vital domestic challenge. I for one believe that a people able to develop our country into such a paradise as we now enjoy must have the ability to destroy such a parasite as organized crime. Along with all thinking U.S. citizens, I have every confidence that through you, our local law enforcement profession, this end will be attained. As I said earlier I am happy to see you devote your attention at this meeting to traffic problems. And so it is to this other type of criminal that we now turn our attention. You alone have the power to bring it into play more effectively. It is time we got out of the talking stage on the enforcement program and into the courthouse. That is what the experts in the field have been recommending, the people are entitled to no less. It is your job to free citizens from the murderous motorist as much as from the murdering hoodlum. The whole tone of courtroom procedure can be set by the demeanor of the prosecutor.