We introduce a new data set recording the vote of every Justice in 18,812 Supreme Court cases decided between 1838 and 1949. When combined with existing data sets, our new data allow us to examine votes in all cases through 2009. We use this data to address previously unanswerable questions...

Two prominent theories of legal decision making provide seemingly contradictory explanations for judicial outcomes. In political science, the Attitudinal Model suggests that judicial outcomes are driven by judges' sincere policy preferences - judges bring their ideological inclinations to the...

I examine all cases decided by the New York State Ethics Commission between 1980-2005 to determine the rates at which judges are cited for ethical violations and the types of violations they receive. I find, using data from over 650 ethics citations, that judges cited often 1) exhibit a pattern...

The Framers of the Constitution thought so highly of the right to trial by jury that they put it in the body of that document. Likewise, James Madison and the First Congress mentioned it twice in the Bill of Rights for much the same reason. Trial by jury to them meant a delicate and important...

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower-echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In...

At the level of constitutional law, Williams-Yulee is a First Amendment case about judicial campaign fundraising. The First Amendment issues raised by judicial campaigns and money in politics are vital, and they are not the only issues implicated by Williams-Yulee. Williams-Yulee also implicates...

This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on...