Campaign contributions – their salience, how they distribute, and their implications for political accountability and local control – have been studied extensively in the executive, legislative, and, increasingly, state judicial contexts. How reported campaign contributions vary across local prosecutor candidates as well as inform prosecutor election outcomes, however, are comparatively less well understood despite an increasing amount of campaign contributions flowing into local prosecutor elections over time. Drawing from a leading and recently released dataset that links campaign information from 3,123 local prosecutor candidates and the most recent election cycles across 2,205 districts between 2012 and 2019, this study seeks to develop an initial accounting of factors which plausibly inform local prosecutor candidates’ campaign fundraising success. To do so, the models evaluate how reported campaign contributions distribute at the individual candidate and district levels and separate contested and uncontested prosecutor elections. When it comes to campaign contribution totals, while findings from contested and uncontested election models, as expected, evidence important differences, these differences are generally stable across the candidate and district levels. Comparing findings from candidate- and district-level models, by contrast, uncovers an important difference involving incumbency status. Taken together, the findings make clear that while campaign contributions inform prosecutor election outcomes, factors that inform fundraising success vary across contested and uncontested elections as well as across candidate- and district-levels. These variations, in turn, raise important distributional concerns.

This paper presents empirical evidence that Supreme Court voting on stays and injunctions is associated with justices’ expected preferences for resolving the merits. This result is especially pronounced when the merits remain pending before a lower court. Combined with a largely overlooked recent shift in the procedural context in which these applications arise, the latter finding helps explain increased decision salience and controversy. Emphasizing procedural context also sharpens inference about institutional performance, focuses normative proposals to enhance reason giving, and illustrates how undifferentiated conceptual labels such as shadow docket, emergency docket, and interim docket obscure important variation.

The massive prosecutorial undertaking for the January 6th insurrection prompts us to ask why Americans disapproved of punishment outcomes. We root people’s perceptions of prosecution and punishment in a threat-based understanding of the justice system, in which punishment has been used to maintain group privileges. Americans are generally supportive of punishing justice protests, but January 6th was about maintaining white and male privilege. We see opposition to January 6th punishments as patterned by an intersectional threat: a perceived challenge to racial and gendered privileges. Results suggest direct and interactive roles for racial and gendered threats on disapproval of prosecutorial punishments.1

We extend cue theory to examine why and how dissent on the court below acts as a cue to apex courts in selecting the cases they hear. We posit that dissent on the court below is a cue to the apex court that the case involves complex legal issues. To test our predictions about how dissent on the court below affects the selection of cases and factors mediating and moderating this relationship, we use original data on 8,405 special leave applications to the High Court of Australia (2003–2018), finding evidence in support of cue theory.

Senatorial scrutiny of judicial nominees has long centered on the role of confirmation hearings in advice and consent, but senators draw on multiple sources of information when evaluating nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Questions for the Record (QFRs) – written questions submitted to nominees after the conclusion of their hearings – are a common yet understudied component of the Judiciary Committee’s vetting process. I analyze the use of QFRs for all Circuit Court of Appeals nominees from 2001 to 2022, finding that partisan differences between the nominating president and senator strongly structure who submits them, while interest group opposition to a nominee, though significant, plays a more modest role than it does in senators’ question-asking behavior during confirmation hearings. Moreover, senators’ use of QFRs has increased substantially in recent sessions of Congress, especially following reforms to the filibuster in 2013. These findings suggest that QFRs are not simply an extension of hearing questions. Instead, they serve their own vetting functions for Committee senators, particularly for outpartisans, those highly engaged in the process, and when time constraints may limit other means of vetting.

Backlash has become commonplace against elected officials across the United States. This is especially true for reform prosecutors, who seek to move away from traditional, tough-on-crime approaches to prosecution. How do prosecutors make sense of backlash to reform policies? How do prosecutors respond to attempts to limit their discretion, remove them from office, or otherwise inhibit their power? We draw on 68 interviews with prosecutors from 33 states and find that reform prosecutors report a chilling effect of backlash, which has pushed some out of office and forced others to carry out reforms under personally and professionally fraught conditions.

Most US chief local prosecutors are elected, presenting foundational accountability questions. Prosecutors have significant incumbency advantages and wield broad discretion over criminal charges and plea deals. Our study illuminates a knowledge deficit regarding prosecutors. National and state surveys show that most Americans do not know core prosecutorial functions and cannot correctly identify their prosecutors, likely stemming from poor information provision. Among low-information respondents, job approval of prosecutors is lower compared to high-information respondents. This uncovers an accountability paradox: (1) the public knows little about prosecutors, (2) knowing less decreases prosecutor approval, but (3) most prosecutors are reelected time and again.

Federal prosecutors regularly transition to private practice, where they often defend the same types of cases and clients they once prosecuted. This may be particularly true for Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in white-collar cases. Here, using data linking career trajectories to case outcomes, we examine whether AUSAs who depart for private practice treat corporate defendants differently than those who remain in government. We find “revolving” prosecutors exhibit greater leniency toward corporate defendants than their counterparts; this is clearest in cases involving big law firms. The findings speak to the revolving door’s impact on corporate accountability and career-duty tensions for prosecutors.

Legal jurisprudence is widely debated but rarely measured. We present the first comprehensive measure of jurisprudence in U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1870 to 2024. Building on qualitative studies of legal reasoning, we classify court opinions into two contrasting types: “formal” reasoning and anti-formal or “grand” reasoning. The foundation of this measurement dataset is a smaller, hand-annotated dataset created by a team of domain experts. Using this annotated dataset, we fine-tune and evaluate a foundational large language model, which is then employed to predict legal reasoning across all opinions in the full dataset. We demonstrate the potential of this new measure for applications in empirical research, enabling analyses of shifts in jurisprudence over time, the reasoning styles of individual justices, and the relationship between legal reasoning and other judicial features, such as ideology. To support further research, we release the annotated dataset, the fine-tuned model, and the final measures, offering a resource for both studying legal reasoning and judicial behavior and evaluating language models in the legal domain.