Numerous studies have found that elite and popular preferences influence decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court; yet, uncertainty remains about when, how, and why the Court is constrained by external pressure. I argue the justices are constrained, at least in part, because they fear nonimplementation of their decisions. I test this theory by utilizing a recent study of judicial power, which finds the Court enjoys greater implementation power in “vertical” cases (those involving criminal and civil liability) than in “lateral” cases (all others; e.g., those involving schools or government agencies). I find that Court constraint is strongest in important lateral cases—those cases in which implementation depends on support from nonjudicial actors. My findings suggest that Supreme Court constraint is driven by the justices' fear of nonimplementation and is, therefore, dependent on institutional context.

Few institutions in the world are credited with initiating and confounding political change on the scale of the United States Supreme Court. The Court is uniquely positioned to enhance or inhibit political reform, enshrine or dismantle social inequalities, and expand or suppress individual rights. Yet despite claims of victory from judicial activists and complaints of undemocratic lawmaking from the Court's critics, numerous studies of the Court assert that it wields little real power. This book examines the nature of Supreme Court power by identifying conditions under which the Court is successful at altering the behavior of state and private actors. Employing a series of longitudinal studies that use quantitative measures of behavior outcomes across a wide range of issue areas, it develops and supports a new theory of Supreme Court power.

Objective. Proponents of the "regime politics" approach argue that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to promote the interests of the dominant partisan coalition even while engaging in seemingly countermajoritarian behavior. These scholars suggest that the Court's invalidation of state laws is used to enforce a national consensus against outlier states. We argue this claim does not withstand empirical analysis. Method. We employ logistic regression analysis to evaluate the relationship between the invalidation of state laws by the Court and the ideological distance between the sitting national government and the state government that enacted the law. Results. Our analysis fails to find support for the regime enforcement hypothesis; in fact, we find evidence of a negative relationship between ideological distance and invalidation. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that regime politics scholars have underestimated the Court's countermajoritarian role in reviewing state legislation.

For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet, some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted from 1949 through 2008 and estimate the probability of a law being challenged and subsequently invalidated by the Supreme Court. Our methodological approach overcomes problems of selection bias and facilitates a test of judicial majoritarianism and the mechanisms that drive that behavior. We find that the Court tends to invalidate laws with little support from elected officials, and this pattern is primarily driven by the justices' concern for congressional constraint during the certiorari stage.

Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges, Journal of Politics 62(2):387–413) Party-Adjusted Judge Ideology and Bonica and Woodruff's (2014, A common-space measure of state supreme court ideology, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, doi: 10.1093/jleo/ewu016) judicial CFscores. Here, we introduce a third measurement strategy that combines CFscores with item response (IRT) estimates of judicial voting behavior in all fifty-two state courts of last resort from 1995 to 2010. We show that leveraging two distinct sources of information (votes and CFscores) yields a superior estimation strategy. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of the combined measure: (1) it is estimated dynamically, allowing for the possibility that judges' ideological leanings change over time and (2) it maps judges into a common space. In a comparison against existing measurement strategies, we find that our measure offers superior performance in predicting judges' votes. We conclude that it is a valuable tool for advancing the study of judicial politics.

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The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using an automated textual analysis program, we find that parties who employ less emotional language in their briefs are more likely to win a justice’s vote, a result that holds even after controlling for other features correlated with success, such as case quality. These findings suggest that advocates seeking to influence judges can enhance their credibility and attract justices’ votes by employing measured, objective language.

The study of U.S. state supreme courts has been significantly constrained by a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency, this article introduces an original data set of every state supreme court ruling from 1995 through 2010. We utilize automated textual analysis to search the text of thousands of state supreme court decisions and extract critical information on each case. This automated coding approach produces reliable measures of state supreme court decision making when compared with data collected by human coders. We present trends in docket size, dissent rates, and legal issues being heard in front of the court. This new data set will offer scholars numerous opportunities to expand our knowledge of judicial politics in the American states.