At the core of the debate on how judges should be selected is the issue whether the judiciary should be accountable or independent. Among the various selection systems in the states, including partisan elections, non-partisan elections, gubernatorial and legislative appointment, and the...

According to the most prominent proponents of the Attitudinal Model, justices on the United States Supreme Court decide cases based solely on their political preferences and ideology. Law and precedent, these advocates say, provide no more than convenient rationalizations. At this point, there...

How does a U.S. court of appeals deal with a Supreme Court intervention into its ongoing work? A law-changing ruling affects not only the immediate parties but also many factually similar or related cases, and the affected court must cope with the situation. Mandates in recently-decided cases...

We explore the extent to which status quo (SQ) models, whether situational or psychological, are useful for modeling decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court. We conclude that such models, when combined with other variables, are useful for modeling Supreme Court decision making at the...

This paper examines Supreme Court confirmation hearings and their role in the political process. In particular, we are interested here in exploring the relationship between nominee candor and the Judiciary Committee's votes. Do senators support nominees who are more forthcoming and vote against...

Lacking both an electoral connection and a means of enforcing its rulings, public esteem is arguably more important to the Court's political health than it is to the democratically accountable branches. Given the importance of public support to the Supreme Court's political health, and given the...

We investigate the dimensionality of Mexico's Supreme Court by analyzing individual justice behavior in judicial review petitions heard between 1995 and 2007. We specify a dynamic, two-dimensional item response model to estimate ideal points and their temporal drift from all contested votes...

If judicial behavior is structured largely by the policy preferences of judges, political scientists ought to consider the source of those preferences. Religion is one force that can strongly shape a judge's worldview and therefore her votes. I examine the effect of religion on U.S. Supreme...