New Data on State Supreme Court Cases

Hall, Matthew E. K.; Windett, Jason Harold

doi:10.1177/1532440013497971

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…To overcome these limitations, we utilize M. E. Hall and Windett's (2013) new data set on every decision in all 52 state supreme courts from 1995 to 2004. 6 The Hall and Windett data include valid and reliable measures of dissent behavior across every state in all issue areas over a decade.…”

Section: Data and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Discouraging Dissent

Hall

Windett

2016

American Politics Research

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Chief judges often strive to promote consensus in their courts to promote public confidence, durable precedents, and intracourt collegiality; yet, some chiefs succeed, whereas others fail. In this article, we identify institutional factors that facilitate and hinder the chief's ability to promote consensus by examining dissent rates in every state court of last resort from 1995 to 2004. Consistent with prior work, we find that consensus is partially driven by the chief judge's formal powers and the institutional resources available to court members. However, we also find that member resources moderate the chief's influence. The chief's formal powers are associated with lower dissent rates in courts that lack time, staff, docket control, and insulation from the electorate. In contrast, judges who possess greater resources are highly resistant to the chief's influence. Our findings suggest a fundamental dynamic of political leadership that may operate across institutional contexts.

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Section: Data and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Discouraging Dissent

Hall

Windett

2016

American Politics Research

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“…Utilizing the new data set constructed by Hall and Windett (2013), we estimate ideal points for state supreme court judges employing the same methodological approach that Martin and Quinn (2002) use for U.S. Supreme Court justices. 1 Following Martin and Quinn, we derive a dynamic item response (IRT) model for state supreme court judges from a spatial model of voting.…”

Section: Existing Measures Of State Supreme Court Ideal Pointsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts

Windett

Harden²,

Hall³

2015

Polit. anal.

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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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“…Responsiveness Hypothesis: Justices chosen by partisan elites who are subject to periodic reappointment will exhibit the highest level of responsiveness to elite ideology.Data, Variables, and MethodsI test these hypotheses using Matthew Hall and Jason Windett's state supreme court dataset, which used automated textual analysis to collect every state supreme court ruling from 1995 through 2010. When compared with the State Supreme Court Data Project, created by Melinda Gann Hall and Paul Brace using hand-coding procedures,Hall and Windett (2013) produced reliable measures of state supreme court decisionmaking. This analysis examines business cases decided in state supreme courts.…”

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confidence: 99%

Judicial Independence on Unelected State Supreme Courts

Blake

2018

Justice System Journal

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The state supreme court literature often overlooks the 12 states that use traditional appointment systems or fails to explore differences in their judicial designs. Eight states require justices to be reappointed at the end of a fixed term, while a different set of eight states currently use judicial commissions to limit the discretion of partisan elites to appoint judges. I develop a principal-agent theory of judicial independence to test how unelected judges under different institutional arrangements respond to elite preferences. An analysis of business cases from 1995-2010 indicates justices selected by judicial commissions are significantly less sensitive to elite ideology than justices nominated by partisan elites. The most responsive behavior occurs among justices subject to periodic reappointment who are chosen by partisan elites, while tenured judges chosen by judicial commissions behave independently of elite ideology. The data also provide evidence that state tort reforms significantly increase the probability of pro-business votes.

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New Data on State Supreme Court Cases

Cited by 18 publications

References 35 publications

Discouraging Dissent

Discouraging Dissent

Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts

Judicial Independence on Unelected State Supreme Courts

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