Why the Supreme Court agrees to hear cases is among the most important topics in judicial politics. However, existing theories have overlooked a key factor: the relative ideologies of the litigating parties. We develop and test a new theory that explicitly incorporates the ideology of the...

We present a new measure of judicial ideology based on judicial hiring behavior. Specifically, we utilize the ideology of the law clerks hired by federal judges to estimate the ideology of the judges themselves. These Clerk-Based Ideology (CBI) scores complement existing measures of judicial...

The ideology of American lawyers has been a persistent source of discussion and debate. Two obstacles, however, have prevented this topic from being systematically studied: the sheer number of attorneys in the United States and the need for a methodology that makes comparing the ideology of...