Although scholars have established that oral arguments play a role in Supreme Court decision making, a fundamental question remains: can oral arguments change justices’ votes? Using data on the positions taken by Justices Blackmun and Powell prior to oral arguments, the authors seek to answer this question while implicitly addressing another: how effectively can attorneys persuade the Court during arguments dominated by justices attempting to persuade each other? The authors find that in a significant minority of cases, justices are persuaded to switch their vote as a result of oral argument and that high-quality attorneys play a central role in that persuasion.

Unable to directly control the policy articulated by the Supreme Court, dissenting justices are faced with the challenge of finding alternative ways to pursue their policy goals. We argue that one strategy available to them is to use their power over the language of a dissenting opinion to increase the media attention paid to a case. Our results show that cases with negative dissents attract more media coverage, which creates a variety of mechanisms through which a dissenter’s policy preferences could be realized, such as inducing Congress to take action, influencing public debate on the issue, and provoking further litigation. This finding ultimately suggests that dissenters, while disadvantaged, are not powerless to affect legal policy.

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Objective. Some models of representation posit that high quality representation hinges on legislators adhering to their campaign promises. Others rest on the idea that representatives should respond to prevailing sentiment among their constituents. Still others suggest that legislators have a special obligation to their supporters-the voters who put them into office. We assess how important citizens think it is for elected officials to respond to each of these representation imperatives. Methods. We leverage a national survey experiment that asked respondents to evaluate a Senator whose behavior conformed to or was at odds with each of these modes of representation. Findings. Adhering to campaign promises and responding to prevailing public preferences similarly, and independently, affect evaluations of whether a vote cast by a legislator was appropriate. We also find a pronounced partisan divide in the importance people attach to responding to electoral supporters' preferences. Conclusions. In the aggregate, Americans value each of the three modes of representation we investigate. However, Democrats attach essentially no independent importance to responsiveness to core supporters, while Republicans see this type of responsiveness as just as important as adhering to campaign promises or responding to the broader constituency.

High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a "merit" method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forwardlooking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicial legitimacy, help states to control policy, and could be more efficient than myopic behavior. Using a recent innovation in matching called covariate-balancing propensity scores, we find that the U.S. Supreme Court is equally likely to review and reverse decisions by judges regardless of their selection or retention methods. These results suggest that state supreme court justices, no matter their paths of getting to (and staying on) their courts, are roughly equal in terms of forward-looking behavior.