Attacking Judges is the most comprehensive empirical assessment of judicial elections to date, right as judicial elections are under fevered criticism, and judicial campaign spending and attack advertising reach historical highs. Attacking Judges purports to debunk criticism of judicial...

Economic theory asserts that, in general, the only cases going to trial should be cases with unpredictable outcomes. When the law applies to the facts to yield consistent and predictable outcomes, litigants have strong incentives to settle cases before trial. I test this theory using a dataset...

In this brief Article, I explore the growing empirical evidence in support of the public choice model of judicial decision making. Although legal scholars have traditionally been reluctant to engage in a critical inquiry into the role of judicial self-interest on judicial behavior, recent...

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the...

This paper analyzes the influence of political and institutional factors on the enactment of sentencing guidelines and truth-in-sentencing legislation by US states. First, we develop a model of strategic interaction among the judiciary, parole boards and state legislators, to analyze the...