A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas
and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together …

I often say that when you can mea sure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know some thing about it; but when you cannot mea sure it, when you cannot …

Back in the 1940s the political scientist C. Herman Pritchett began tallying the votes and
opinions of Supreme Court Justices. His goal was to use data to test the hypothesis that the …

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the
US Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across …

Believers in an independent federal judiciary are battle-weary. A familiar refrain used to
comfort them is that partisanship, at least among lower court judges, is not tolerated. As …

We develop a scaling model to estimate US Supreme Court opinion locations and justice
ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations …

A fundamental academic assumption about the federal courts of appeals is that the three-
judge panels that decide cases have been randomly configured. Scores of scholarly articles …

Why do lower courts treat Supreme Court precedents favorably or unfavorably? To address
this question, we formulate a theoretical framework based on current principal‐agent models …

This article integrates the literatures on judicial compliance, panel decision making, and
case selection in the federal judiciary hierarchy. Many studies have speculated that “panel …

Do hierarchical politics in the federal judiciary shape collegial politics on the US Courts of
Appeals and thus influence judicial voting and case outcomes? I develop a model in which …