Detained individuals subject to deportation have the right to a bond hearing in immigration court similar to that of detained individuals accused of a crime. Unlike criminal law, immigration law places the burden of proof on detained people rather than the government. We analyze the impact of a federal court decision that shifted the burden of proof to the government via a synthetic control study and a qualitative research design grounded in a new theoretical analysis of immigration courts that focuses on judicial decision-making and prosecutorial discretion. The evidence suggests significant limits on the federal courts’ ability to change bond outcomes merely through changing the burden of proof.

A decades-long debate has sought to determine whether judicial elections are detrimental to the impartiality of judges and public support for state court systems. We contribute to that discussion by assessing whether elections work to hold errant judges accountable. We use a novel dataset of judicial scandal, including newspaper reports of misconduct against elected state supreme court justices. Our data examines the effect of scandal from 2000–2023 to determine whether controversy affects voter support for incumbents. We find voters pay attention to the harmful effects of scandal on judiciaries and that impacted incumbents experience diminished support, relative to other incumbents.

An often-used normative argument for increasing judicial diversity is that it will enhance public confidence in courts. This paper tests competing perspectives about whether the descriptive representation of women in the federal judiciary will improve institutional trust, using a nationally representative survey experiment. The findings suggest that, in the post-Dobbs era, descriptive representation for gender on low visibility courts yields a positive effect on institutional trust, but that the magnitude of the effect is quite small, time limited, and restricted to Democrats and to those who already have higher levels of trust.

Explorations of ideology retain special significance in contemporary studies of judicial politics. While some existing methodologies draw on voting patterns and coalition alignments to map a jurist’s latent features, many are otherwise reliant on supplemental proxies – often directly from adjacent actors or via assessments from various prognosticators. We propose an alternative that not only leverages observable judicial behavior, but does so through jurists’ articulations on the law. In particular, we adapt a hierarchical factor model to demonstrate how latent ideological preferences emerge through the written text of opinions. Relying on opinion content from Justices of the Supreme Court, we observe a discernible correlation between linguistic choices and latent expressions of ideology irrespective of known preferences or voting patterns. Testing our method against Martin-Quinn, we find our approach strongly correlates with this validated and commonly used measure of judicial ideology. We conclude by discussing the intuitive power of text as a feature of ideology, as well as how this process can extend to judicial actors and institutions beyond the Supreme Court.

As expectations for research output evolve, tenure portfolios serve as valuable records of how a field gauges impact. We analyze the records of 184 Law and Courts faculty at PhD-granting institutions and find that the median portfolio has grown from seven to ten peer-reviewed articles, that scholars publish in a wider variety of outlets, and that coauthorship rates have doubled over our four-decade time period. We also note patterns of gendered collaboration and private-institution advantages. These trends suggest shifting tenure expectations, complicate traditional metrics of impact, and underscore the need to initiate data-driven conversations about scholarly impact in an increasingly multidisciplinary field.

We argue affiliation with an American conservative legal movement key player, the Federalist Society (FedSoc), provides a low-cost, high-information cue to senators voting on nominees. We investigate how FedSoc affiliation shapes senator voting behavior on judicial nominations. Using a novel dataset of 35,602 roll call votes on all federal judicial nominations (1991–2020), we find Federalist Society affiliation dramatically impacts the likelihood of receiving a senator’s vote with Democrats less likely to vote for Federalist Society-affiliated nominees than Republicans across the federal judiciary. Senator ideology matters with more ideologically extreme Republicans – and more moderate Democrats – more likely to vote for FedSoc-affiliated nominees. Relatedly, Republican senators – regardless of their own affiliation with the group – reveal strong support for FedSoc affiliates. Taken together, we show nominee affiliation with the Federalist Society is a crucial cue when senators vote on judicial nominees.1

A large empirical literature examines how judges’ traits affect how cases get resolved. This literature has led many to conclude that judges matter for case outcomes. But how much do they matter? Existing empirical findings understate the true extent of judicial influence over case outcomes since standard estimation techniques hide some disagreement among judges. We devise a machine learning method to reveal additional sources of disagreement. Applying this method to the Ninth Circuit, we estimate that at least 38% of cases could be decided differently based solely on the panel they were assigned to.

Do oral arguments influence state supreme courts, and if so, how? Focusing on a “thinking-fast” framework, this study analyzes 2014–2021 New York Court of Appeals oral arguments to test whether non-traditional factors such as expressed emotion can shape decisions. Empirical analysis drawn from textual data shows that oral arguments can explain decision-making, and that justices’ emotion during arguments likely plays a role. The findings challenge normatively rational models of judicial behavior by underscoring affective, real-time influences and highlight oral arguments as a consequential stage in subnational adjudication. This is the first evidence of their meaningful role in state supreme courts.

Lawyers play a central role in every political system in the United States. However, although lawyers are overrepresented in political office, women lawyers are underrepresented. We argue that, for men, attending law school and seeking political office aligns with broader career goals and gendered socialization patterns. We use an original survey of undergraduate social science majors to show that agentic career goals, or interest in influence, prestige, and wealth, are associated with attending law school. Data from a panel study of lawyers demonstrates that agentic goals predict political ambition. Women lawyers are less politically ambitious; agentic goals mediate this relationship.

We analyze nearly 70,000 New York City criminal court arraignments to examine how judges’ professional backgrounds influence pretrial detention. We classify judges as having experience in law enforcement, legal services, both, or neither. Judges with law enforcement backgrounds are, on average, 3.9 percentage points more likely than others to order detention and impose cash bail. When bail is imposed, they set amounts about 32% higher. No significant differences emerge for legal services backgrounds. Because law enforcement experience is common among judges, our findings have broad implications for pretrial detention nationwide.

The last decade has witnessed a significant increase in academic and journalistic interest in the United States Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Yet despite this increased interest, there exists no systematic database of the shadow docket. This paper summarizes the Supreme Court Shadow Docket Database, which we created by parsing the Journal of the Supreme Court from the 1993 through 2024 terms into individual orders. We categorize these orders into a set of usable categories, including cert denials, injunctions, summary reversals, mandamus petitions, and grant, vacate, and remands. We illustrate some potential uses of the data by examining several interesting trends in the Court’s use of the shadow docket over time.

Personal experiences with public officials influence how those officials are perceived. We question whether these experiential effects extend to other officials. If people draw on what they know to make inferences about unfamiliar evaluative targets, then interactions with one actor may shape evaluations of other independent actors. Focusing on police and courts, analyses of data from two surveys reveal that personal interactions with public officials produce spillover effects on appraisals of officials in different sectors. The findings indicate that experiential spillover constitutes an underappreciated force in public opinion, one that operates outside the control of the actors being evaluated.

How do U.S. Supreme Court justices use legal scholarship? In recent landmark decisions like Trump v. CASA (2025) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the justices cited several pieces of legal scholarship in their opinions. Yet little is known of how and how often the members of the Court engage in this practice. In this article, I provide new data on the Court’s citation to legal scholarship under the Roberts Court from 2005 to 2023. I find that there is a strong upward trend in the number of citations to legal scholarship, with large increases in more recent years. Further, there is an increase in the percentage of opinions by the Court that cite legal scholarship. Also, the justices are using the most legal scholarship in some of the Court’s most recent salient decisions. Additionally, the justices overwhelmingly cite legal scholarship published in the most elite law review journals, with Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal emerging as the preferred outlets. Lastly, the data shows that the distribution of law professors cited by the justices is highly skewed, with a small number of individuals accounting for a disproportionately large share of citations, to which most share an association with the Federalist Society. The data is clear that the justices have altered the way in which they use legal scholarship in their opinions. This article sets the foundation for future theoretical work on the Court’s use of legal scholarship in its opinions.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ambiguous institutional position—insulated from external pressures yet retaining important linkages with elected officials—complicates how the public assigns responsibility for its decisions. Using a survey experiment that shows respondents information about Dobbs, we explore how messages that politicize or depoliticize the Court affect responsibility attribution for Court decisions. We find that politicizing the Court increases responsibility attribution towards President Trump, and that this effect is conditioned by party cues. We explore downstream effects on evaluations of political actors, but do not find conclusive evidence. We argue that these findings have important implications for democratic accountability.