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AbstractObjectiveFor years, scholars have employed Justice Harry Blackmun's private grades of attorneys to measure attorney oral argument quality. Using archival data, I analyze whether Justice Blackmun experienced order effects.MethodsI estimate numerous ordinary least squares regression models on private archival data.ResultsBlackmun's respondent grades appear to have been influenced by his perceptions of how the petitioners performed. This finding holds across a series of checks, including those that examine whether some cases simply attract better or worse attorneys.ConclusionThe results suggest that scholars should not use the Blackmun grades as "point estimates" but, instead, as rankings. They also suggest that previous findings may have overstated the influence of oral argument. The fact that one justice displayed evidence of a cognitive illusion also suggests that such effects may exist in various aspects of decision making.

This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every model tested, the data show justices uninfluenced by the separation of powers. These results provide a strong rejoinder to SOP models, since the Court's agenda stage is the most likely stage of the decision‐making process to show signs of an SOP effect.

The United States government, represented by the Office of the Solicitor General, appears before the Supreme Court more than any other litigant. The Office's link to the president, the arguments it makes before the Court and its ability to alter the legal and policy landscape make it the most important Supreme Court litigant bar none. As such, scholars must understand the Office's role in Supreme Court decision making and its ability to influence the Court. It examines whether and how the Office of the Solicitor General influences the United States Supreme Court. Combining archival data with recent innovations in the areas of matching and causal inference, the book finds that the Solicitor General influences every aspect of the Court's decision-making process. From granting review to cases, selecting winning parties, writing opinions and interpreting precedent, the Solicitor General's office influences the Court to behave in ways it otherwise would not

Recent research shows that many people support courts based on their ideological congruence with those courts and their decisions. But people likely hold varying degrees of intensity in their preferences for judges who will implement conservative or liberal policy. We suspect that court support is a function of that intensity. Our results agree. Court support turns on the intensity with which people prefer conservative, moderate, or liberal judges. In fact, accounting for the strength with which people prefer ideological judges explains more of their support for courts than some existing approaches.

How do Americans' preferences over judicial philosophy influence their support for judges and judicial decisions? Using an experiment attached to an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that people hold preferences over judicial philosophies, that they rely on those preferences to evaluate judges and decisions, and that those preferences are not simply stand-ins for ideology and partisanship. These findings suggest that to understand people's support for judges and judicial decisions one must pay attention to judicial philosophy.

When arguing at the U.S. Supreme Court, former High Court law clerks enjoy significant influence over their former justices. Our analysis of forty years of judicial votes reveals that an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 16 percent more likely to capture that justice's vote than an otherwise identical attorney who never clerked. What is more, an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 14 to 16 percent more likely to capture that justice's vote than an otherwise identical attorney who previously clerked for a different justice. Former clerk influence is substantial, targeted, and appears to come from clerks' personalized information about their justices. These results answer an important empirical question about the role of attorneys while raising normative concerns over fairness in litigation.

Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that judges with greater past elected political experience may be more responsive. The results have implications for democratic control of the unelected judiciary, and suggest that appointing judges with electoral experience could, for better or worse, lead to a more majoritarian judiciary.

Because the Supreme Court can decide only so many cases per term, justices carefully target which cases they hear and which parties they supervise. We focus on their decisions to hear cases involving states as parties. We believe justices use the agenda power to target states with whom they disagree ideologically. Granting review allows justices to keep an eye on wayward states and to remind them of the ever-present threat of Supreme Court review. The results support our theory. Justices are significantly more likely to grant review to cases involving ideologically unfriendly states—and these results are exacerbated in salient cases. These findings suggest justices are more aggressive agenda setters than commonly believed. In addition, the findings suggest that even the so-called federalism revolution of the Rehnquist Court was driven by policy goals.