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Since the United States Supreme Court's decision in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002), candidate running for state judicial offices have been free to engage in position-taking during their campaigns. This has led to a general concern that the floodgates have been opened for negative campaigning paid for by "special interests" - a practice many begrudgingly accept for legislative and executive races, but is considered by many observers to be inappropriate for those seeking a position as judge. Using data compiled by the Wisconsin Advertising Project and the Wesleyan Media Project, we conduct a content analysis of judicial campaign ads over the last decade. We investigate what issues candidates focus on in their ads, what factors lead to negative advertising, and how often judicial candidates try to remain "above the fray" by not invoking political language or positions in their ads. This research provides insight not only into the dynamics of judicial campaign advertising, but how those dynamics differ from those in races for other offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its organization in the early 1980s, the Federalist Society has sought to influence the federal courts by promoting conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. Qualitative accounts provide evidence that the Federalist Society has succeeded in this goal by acting as a political epistemic network. Here, I investigate the organization's influence on a large-N scale. I argue that, if the Federalist Society does indeed proliferate legal arguments throughout its network, we should expect to see shared language among its members. Using plagiarism detection software, I compare the opinions of Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito and Chief Justice Roberts - the Supreme Court's four Federalist Society members - to the opinions of those trying to influence them (in this preliminary analysis, judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals) in order find the degree to which they share common phrases. While I find no independent effect of Federalist Society participation on shared language, I do find that these four justices borrow language from judges nominated by Reagan and W. Bush (both sympathetic to the Federalist Society vision) at a higher rate than they do from judges nominated by other presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]