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 …

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 …

Many studies have identified a line of influence between interest group lobbying and the
federal bureaucracy's implementation of public policy. These works, however, have often …

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 …

The past decade has witnessed a worldwide explosion of work aimed at illuminating judicial-
behavior: the choices judges make and the consequences of their choices. We focus on …

Intercircuit splits occur when two or more circuits on the US Courts of Appeals issue different
legal rules about the same legal question. When this happens, federal law is applied …

We leverage the institutional features of American courts to evaluate the importance of
whistleblowers in hierarchical oversight. Drawing on a formal theory of signaling in the …

" Constitutional courts in many countries seek to constrain elected actors often by striking
down or vetoing their laws. A large proportion of these courts select their judges through a …

Crucial to understanding the behavior of judges and the outputs of courts is the institutional
context in which they operate. One key component of courts' institutional structure is that the …

Judges like to claim that they are impartial decision-makers fully capable of suppressing
their personal proclivities, as the rule of law requires. But a century's worth of studies …