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A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together legal concerns and political science priorities. This doctrinal-politics approach highlights a relatively new formal apparatus known as the case-space model, and it invokes close ties between theoretical and empirical work and between the study of judicial behavior and actual legal practices and institutions. The case-space model is an adaption of standard policy-space modeling, tailored for the distinguishing features of judicial policy making. It allows for ideological differences between judges while expressing those differences in terms of legal rules that partition fact-filled legal cases into different dispositions. I explore the intellectual origins and primary contributions of the approach, focusing on how legal policy is affected by collegiality (the multi-member nature of appellate courts) and hierarchy (the multi-level division of court systems).

A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together legal concerns and political science priorities. This doctrinal-politics approach highlights a relatively new formal apparatus known as the case-space model, and it invokes close ties between theoretical and empirical work and between the study of judicial behavior and actual legal practices and institutions. The case-space model is an adaption of standard policy-space modeling, tailored for the distinguishing features of judicial policy making. It allows for ideological differences between judges while expressing those differences in terms of legal rules that partition fact-filled legal cases into different dispositions. I explore the intellectual origins and primary contributions of the approach, focusing on how legal policy is affected by collegiality (the multi-member nature of appellate courts) and hierarchy (the multi-level division of court systems). Adapted from the source document.

Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegial rule that captures majoritarian preferences, and to show that there will exist a median rule even if there is no single median judge. I show how collegial rules can differ from the rules of individual judges and how judicial institutions (such as appellate review and the power to write separate opinions) affect the stability and enforceability of legal rules. These results are discussed in light of fundamental debates between legal and political perspectives on judicial behavior.

I develop a formal model of the interaction between auditing by the Supreme Court (certiorari) and compliance by the lower courts, presenting three challenges to the existing literature. First, I show that even discretionary certiorari (the Court can choose which cases to hear) only goes so far in inducing compliance. Second, the literature often treats the Court as a unitary actor, ignoring the Rule of Four (only four votes are needed to grant certiorari). This rule is generally assumed to limit majoritarian dominance - this is a puzzle given that the rule itself is subject to majority control. I show that it actually increases majority power by increasing lower court compliance. Finally, while sincere behavior is often taken for granted at the Supreme Court level, I show that potential non-compliance creates heretofore unrecognized incentives for the justices to conceal their true preferences, so as to induce greater compliance. They can exploit even minimal uncertainty to manipulate asymmetric information in a signaling game of strategic reputation building, further increasing compliance under the Rule of Four.

In 1960, a televised presidential debate, four of them in fact, occurred for the first time. This came to seem, despite initial expectations, a mere blip in electoral history until the debates of 1976. During the intervening era, strategic political maneuvering was limited almost solely to the question of whether to debate, the answer always being resoundingly negative. In 1964, 1968, and 1972, the front-runner declined the invitation to debate to preserve his status as such (Alexander and Margolis 1978, 19). By 1980, the simple tactical choice of whether to debate had matured into an intricate series of strategic decisions—a yes/no question had been transformed into a debate on debates and their format. Concerns ranged from the number of debates and their timing to the use of props. By 1984, debates had become a campaign staple, and, by 1996, the debate over debate format had become a "campaign ritual" (Lewis 1996a). No current commentator is surprised, as was one of the panelists in one of the 1980 debates, by "how much the format is the debate" (Golden 1980). An editorial described the situation one year (and, without context, it is difficult to tell which) as follows:A standard was set for participation by minor candidates—and then faithlessly abandoned. The major candidates maneuvered … baldly for advantage…. There was endless bickering about format and bargaining over the questioners. All of which produced wide public cynicism. There has to be a better way. ("Repair" 1980)I will argue that there is indeed a better way to handle this metadebate.