Judicial Politics

Courting Controversy: Reasons for Judicial Ideologues to Moderate
Some accounts of US Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization paint Chief Justice John Roberts as …
JBrandon Duck-Mayr
Feb 14, 2023
PDF
Political Competition and Judicial Independence: How Courts Fill the Void When Legislatures Are Ineffective
What effect does political competition have in generating de facto judicial independence? We argue that competition in a legislature …
Joshua Boston, David Carlson, JBrandon Duck-Mayr, Greg Sasso
Nov 2, 2022
PDF
The Force of the Law
(How much) does “the law” affect judges decisions? Though among the most fundamental of questions in judicial politics, the effect of …
JBrandon Duck-Mayr
Sep 12, 2021
PDF
Agenda Setting and Attention to Precedent in the US Federal Courts
To what degree is judicial agenda setting top-down or bottom-up? Existing studies lack evidence of the frequency or magnitude of these …
JBrandon Duck-Mayr, Thomas G. Hansford, James F. Spriggs, II
PDF Publisher Link Replication Archive Cite
Explaining legal inconsistency
Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts’ policy making …
JBrandon Duck-Mayr
PDF Publisher Link Cite