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Given their place within the judicial hierarchy, judges on lower courts face a complex array of challenges including heavy caseloads, mandatory dockets, and the threat of Supreme Court reversal. Despite the extensive scholarship on the American courts, little is known about judicial interactions in comparative contexts. We articulate and evaluate a framework for lower court adherence to Supreme Court precedents by leveraging a cross-national design in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with similar systems but meaningful institutional variability. We find that the mechanisms promulgating adherence to Supreme Court precedents do not substantially vary across design or institutional context. Instead, our results demonstrate that legal factors exert a consistent, homogeneous effect on lower court compliance across judicial systems. Our work offers new and important implications for studies on law and courts and comparative institutions, more broadly.

ObjectiveWhile studies frequently examine the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court as an institution, little is known about how individual justices influence attention to their opinions. We investigate whether inherent differences in the majority opinions of individual justices result in certain justices being systematically more influential than their peers.MethodsWe advance a theory in which Supreme Court adoption of prior opinions is influenced by factors that relate to the identity of the authoring justice. To test these propositions, we explore the universe of the Supreme Court's signed majority opinions from 1986 to 2000.ResultsWe find that intricate tendencies in opinion writing vary systematically by justice in key dimensions relating to their opinions. We also discover that differences among the justices exert an asymmetric impact on citation and adherence to precedent.ConclusionThe findings offer important theoretical and normative implications toward a better understanding of the impact of Supreme Court justices on attentiveness to precedent and doctrinal development.

Most empirical examinations of hierarchical interactions among the courts are limited to a single judiciary, the American courts. A significant puzzle that remains is the extent to which lower courts in comparative environments follow the legal pronouncements of their court of last resort. We confront this shortcoming by examining lower court adherence to the precedents of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. As the Law Lords in the United Kingdom primarily oversee a single lower court, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, this design provides a unique opportunity to assess the factors that influence hierarchical responses to precedent. We offer a framework in which legal, rather than strategic, factors influence the propensity with which lower court judges rely on the precedents of the House of Lords. Using an original data set of over 13,000 lower court responses to the precedents of the House of Lords between 1970 and 2002, our findings challenge the efficacy of principal–agent accounts and shed new light on how horizontal stare decisis influences decision-making behavior within the United Kingdom.

A defining feature of democracies is an independent legal system, where elites and the public alike accept the broader legitimacy of its actions, even if they run counter to political preferences. Existing scholarship suggests that public support for rule of law institutions is rooted in perceptions of procedural fairness. However, amid increasing levels of affective polarization, we posit a partisan presidential heuristic wherein citizens' views of legal institutions are influenced by their partisanship and signals from the president. Through multiple experiments, we demonstrate that support for two key institutions—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice—is substantially derived from the intersection of one's partisan identity and their partisan proximity to the president. These effects are strongest among respondents exhibiting high levels of affective partisanship. Our results suggest that in forming perceptions of the rule of law, partisan politics is increasingly competing with perceptions of procedural fairness, thereby subverting support for legal institutions in the United States.

We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court's precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court's use of its summary decisions, which explicitly reference its formally argued decisions, increase circuit court utility of the High Court's precedents. We test our predictions using new data on appeals court responses to the Supreme Court's precedents. The empirical results support our account and shed new light on the hierarchical dynamic within the American federal judiciary.

ABSTRACTLegitimacy is a bulwark for courts; even when judges engage in controversial or disagreeable behavior, the public tends to acquiesce. Recent studies identify several threats to the legitimacy of courts, including polarization and attacks by political elites. This article contributes to the scholarly discourse by exploring a previously unconsidered threat: scandal, or allegations of personal misbehavior. We argue that scandals can undermine confidence in judges as virtuous arbiters and erode broad public support for the courts. Using survey experiments, we draw on real-world judicial controversies to evaluate the impact of scandal on specific support for judicial actors and their rulings and diffuse support for the judiciary. We demonstrate that scandals erode individual support but find no evidence that institutional support is diminished. These findings may ease normative concerns that isolated indiscretions by controversial jurists may deplete the vast "reservoir of goodwill" that is foundational to the courts.