Before Supreme Court nominees are allowed to take their place on the High Court, they must face a moment of democratic reckoning by appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite the potential this holds for public input into the direction of legal change, the hearings are routinely derided as nothing but empty rituals and political grandstanding. In this book, Paul M. Collins and Lori A. Ringhand present a contrarian view that uses both empirical data and stories culled from more than seventy years of transcripts to demonstrate that the hearings are a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change. As such, they are one of the ways in which 'We the People' take ownership of the Constitution by examining the core constitutional values of those permitted to interpret it on our behalf.

Finally, we thank Kirk Randazzo and the National Science Foundation for convening the Workshop on the Identification and Integration of Law and Court Data, which was fundamental to bringing this project to fruition. Naturally, we are solely responsible for any errors in fact and/or judgment.

This article uses an original database of confirmation hearing dialogue to examine how the Senate Judiciary Committee's role in Supreme Court confirmations has changed over time, with particular attention paid to the 1939-2010 era. During this period, several notable developments took place, including a rise in the number of hearing comments, increased attention to nominees' views of judicial decisions, an expansion of the scope of issues addressed, and the equalization of questioning between majority and minority party senators. We demonstrate that these changes were shaped by both endogenous and exogenous factors to promote the legitimization of the Judiciary Committee's role in the confirmation process and to foster the instrumental goals of senators. This research contributes to our understanding of the development of political institutions, interbranch interactions, and how institutional change affects the behavior of legal and political actors.

We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nominees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out‐group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more questions about their “judicial philosophies” in an effort to determine their competence to serve on the Court. This out‐group bias is likely to be exacerbated for nominees not sharing the senator's political party. Our results do not support racial differences, but they do provide strong evidence that female nominees receive more judicial philosophy‐related questions from male senators. This effect is enhanced when the female nominee does not share the partisan affiliation of the questioning senator. Together, these findings indicate that female nominees undergo a substantively different confirmation process than male nominees. We further find that this effect may be most intense with nominees like Justice Sotomayor, whose identities align with more than one out‐group.

Efforts by foreign entities to influence domestic elections have shaken democracies around the world. The use of propaganda and misinformation to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries is not new, but events since 2016 have heightened awareness across the globe of how changes in social media platforms, political norms, and campaign financing rules have enabled foreign actors to influence elections on an unprecedented scale. This special issue of the Election Law Journal explores how six nations have perceived and responded to this threat. These six nations-Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland (as a constituent nation of the UK), Australia, and New Zealand-have faced their own challenges and forged ahead with their own solutions. As the contributions to this issue make clear, in doing so these nations have struggled with similar questions and have worked their way toward a common set of solutions. These efforts have varied in their details-which is what makes comparative review of them valuable-but they have consolidated around the same general set of ideas: better educating citizens about the perils of cyber speech, increasing transparency about who is promoting online communications, building better barriers to exclude foreign funding of electoral communications, and trying to remove the most egregiously false statements from political discourse. The hope of this research is that shedding light on how different nations have operationalized these efforts will demonstrate to election law scholars, regulators, and policy makers around the world the value of comparative work in this area. There is a great deal at stake, and much to learn from the experiences of others.