Existing scholarship on US Supreme Court certiorari has largely centered on the demand side, prioritizing the internal motivations of justices. This approach often overlooks the broader supply-side perspective-the nature and evolution of the complete pool of petitions. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the universe of writs of certiorari from 1946 to 2019. Coding for petition date and origin, petitioner identity, and disposition, we trace the composition of petitions across eras and jurisdictions. By linking petitions to merits-stage attributes, we find that the Court's plenary docket is selected from a geographically and organizationally uneven petition environment, that federal-origin petitions dominate both filings and the docket, and that institutional repeat players succeed at higher rates than individuals despite a steady increase in petitions from the latter. By mapping this upstream landscape, we provide a descriptive baseline and measurement framework that illuminates the dynamics of the petition supply and provides context to the demand-side accounts of Supreme Court agenda-setting.
Prosecutors play a pivotal role in the American criminal justice system, exercising broad discretion over charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations. Yet despite their significant influence, we know surprisingly little about how the public perceives prosecutors - or the conditions under which trust in them is earned or lost. Building on research on political trust and leveraging new, granular survey evidence, we argue that public confidence in prosecutors is shaped by three interacting domains: (1) ideological identity and background characteristics; (2) orientations toward government and legal institutions; and (3) social dynamics - especially political efficacy and social capital. Our analysis shows that these forces jointly structure trust through multiple pathways, clarifying when and why prosecutorial legitimacy is strengthened or undermined. This framework offers concrete benchmarks for understanding variation in trust across communities and for evaluating reforms amid sustained scrutiny of the criminal justice system.
This Research Note is an effort to lay out some ways of thinking about the relation between political time and judicial time. We have decent general descriptive theories of Supreme Court behavior when a political regime is consolidated and seemingly stable, but descriptive theories about the Court's behavior during "transitional" periods are under-developed. The Research Note's contribution is to identify some lines along which such theories might be developed. The analysis is highly speculative, identifying possibilities and offering anecdotal examples as illustrations. Future research into the matters discussed here will undoubtedly deepen, qualify, and refute some of those speculations.
Senatorial scrutiny of judicial nominees has long centered on the role of confirmation hearings in advice and consent, but senators draw on multiple sources of information when evaluating nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Questions for the Record (QFRs) - written questions submitted to nominees after the conclusion of their hearings - are a common yet understudied component of the Judiciary Committee's vetting process. I analyze the use of QFRs for all Circuit Court of Appeals nominees from 2001 to 2022, finding that partisan differences between the nominating president and senator strongly structure who submits them, while interest group opposition to a nominee, though significant, plays a more modest role than it does in senators' question-asking behavior during confirmation hearings. Moreover, senators' use of QFRs has increased substantially in recent sessions of Congress, especially following reforms to the filibuster in 2013. These findings suggest that QFRs are not simply an extension of hearing questions. Instead, they serve their own vetting functions for Committee senators, particularly for outpartisans, those highly engaged in the process, and when time constraints may limit other means of vetting.
Backlash has become commonplace against elected officials across the United States. This is especially true for reform prosecutors, who seek to move away from traditional, tough-on-crime approaches to prosecution. How do prosecutors make sense of backlash to reform policies? How do prosecutors respond to attempts to limit their discretion, remove them from office, or otherwise inhibit their power? We draw on 68 interviews with prosecutors from 33 states and find that reform prosecutors report a chilling effect of backlash, which has pushed some out of office and forced others to carry out reforms under personally and professionally fraught conditions.
Most US chief local prosecutors are elected, presenting foundational accountability questions. Prosecutors have significant incumbency advantages and wield broad discretion over criminal charges and plea deals. Our study illuminates a knowledge deficit regarding prosecutors. National and state surveys show that most Americans do not know core prosecutorial functions and cannot correctly identify their prosecutors, likely stemming from poor information provision. Among low-information respondents, job approval of prosecutors is lower compared to high-information respondents. This uncovers an accountability paradox: (1) the public knows little about prosecutors, (2) knowing less decreases prosecutor approval, but (3) most prosecutors are reelected time and again.
This paper presents empirical evidence that Supreme Court voting on stays and injunctions is associated with justices' expected preferences for resolving the merits. This result is especially pronounced when the merits remain pending before a lower court. Combined with a largely overlooked recent shift in the procedural context in which these applications arise, the latter finding helps explain increased decision salience and controversy. Emphasizing procedural context also sharpens inference about institutional performance, focuses normative proposals to enhance reason giving, and illustrates how undifferentiated conceptual labels such as shadow docket, emergency docket, and interim docket obscure important variation.
Campaign contributions - their salience, how they distribute, and their implications for political accountability and local control - have been studied extensively in the executive, legislative, and, increasingly, state judicial contexts. How reported campaign contributions vary across local prosecutor candidates as well as inform prosecutor election outcomes, however, are comparatively less well understood despite an increasing amount of campaign contributions flowing into local prosecutor elections over time. Drawing from a leading and recently released dataset that links campaign information from 3,123 local prosecutor candidates and the most recent election cycles across 2,205 districts between 2012 and 2019, this study seeks to develop an initial accounting of factors which plausibly inform local prosecutor candidates' campaign fundraising success. To do so, the models evaluate how reported campaign contributions distribute at the individual candidate and district levels and separate contested and uncontested prosecutor elections. When it comes to campaign contribution totals, while findings from contested and uncontested election models, as expected, evidence important differences, these differences are generally stable across the candidate and district levels. Comparing findings from candidate- and district-level models, by contrast, uncovers an important difference involving incumbency status. Taken together, the findings make clear that while campaign contributions inform prosecutor election outcomes, factors that inform fundraising success vary across contested and uncontested elections as well as across candidate- and district-levels. These variations, in turn, raise important distributional concerns.
We extend cue theory to examine why and how dissent on the court below acts as a cue to apex courts in selecting the cases they hear. We posit that dissent on the court below is a cue to the apex court that the case involves complex legal issues. To test our predictions about how dissent on the court below affects the selection of cases and factors mediating and moderating this relationship, we use original data on 8,405 special leave applications to the High Court of Australia (2003-2018), finding evidence in support of cue theory.
In this study, we provide a first-of-its-kind exploration of how strategic messaging by U.S. Attorneys changes during a partisan transition. We leverage original data from United States Attorney's Office press releases that are used to inform the public about important case developments, offering a window into federal prosecutorial priorities and narratives. Using textual analysis, we examine how these political communications changed in the turnover from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration. Then, we utilize criminal case processing data to evaluate whether the content of press releases tracks with U.S. Attorney charging decisions.
The massive prosecutorial undertaking for the January 6th insurrection prompts us to ask why Americans disapproved of punishment outcomes. We root people's perceptions of prosecution and punishment in a threat-based understanding of the justice system, in which punishment has been used to maintain group privileges. Americans are generally supportive of punishing justice protests, but January 6th was about maintaining white and male privilege. We see opposition to January 6th punishments as patterned by an intersectional threat: a perceived challenge to racial and gendered privileges. Results suggest direct and interactive roles for racial and gendered threats on disapproval of prosecutorial punishments.1
Federal prosecutors regularly transition to private practice, where they often defend the same types of cases and clients they once prosecuted. This may be particularly true for Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in white-collar cases. Here, using data linking career trajectories to case outcomes, we examine whether AUSAs who depart for private practice treat corporate defendants differently than those who remain in government. We find "revolving" prosecutors exhibit greater leniency toward corporate defendants than their counterparts; this is clearest in cases involving big law firms. The findings speak to the revolving door's impact on corporate accountability and career-duty tensions for prosecutors.
The U.S. Supreme Court's ambiguous institutional position-insulated from external pressures yet retaining important linkages with elected officials-complicates how the public assigns responsibility for its decisions. Using a survey experiment that shows respondents information about Dobbs, we explore how messages that politicize or depoliticize the Court affect responsibility attribution for Court decisions. We find that politicizing the Court increases responsibility attribution towards President Trump, and that this effect is conditioned by party cues. We explore downstream effects on evaluations of political actors, but do not find conclusive evidence. We argue that these findings have important implications for democratic accountability.
Legal jurisprudence is widely debated but rarely measured. We present the first comprehensive measure of jurisprudence in U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1870 to 2024. Building on qualitative studies of legal reasoning, we classify court opinions into two contrasting types: "formal" reasoning and anti-formal or "grand" reasoning. The foundation of this measurement dataset is a smaller, hand-annotated dataset created by a team of domain experts. Using this annotated dataset, we fine-tune and evaluate a foundational large language model, which is then employed to predict legal reasoning across all opinions in the full dataset. We demonstrate the potential of this new measure for applications in empirical research, enabling analyses of shifts in jurisprudence over time, the reasoning styles of individual justices, and the relationship between legal reasoning and other judicial features, such as ideology. To support further research, we release the annotated dataset, the fine-tuned model, and the final measures, offering a resource for both studying legal reasoning and judicial behavior and evaluating language models in the legal domain.
How do U.S. Supreme Court justices use legal scholarship? In recent landmark decisions like Trump v. CASA (2025) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the justices cited several pieces of legal scholarship in their opinions. Yet little is known of how and how often the members of the Court engage in this practice. In this article, I provide new data on the Court's citation to legal scholarship under the Roberts Court from 2005 to 2023. I find that there is a strong upward trend in the number of citations to legal scholarship, with large increases in more recent years. Further, there is an increase in the percentage of opinions by the Court that cite legal scholarship. Also, the justices are using the most legal scholarship in some of the Court's most recent salient decisions. Additionally, the justices overwhelmingly cite legal scholarship published in the most elite law review journals, with Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal emerging as the preferred outlets. Lastly, the data shows that the distribution of law professors cited by the justices is highly skewed, with a small number of individuals accounting for a disproportionately large share of citations, to which most share an association with the Federalist Society. The data is clear that the justices have altered the way in which they use legal scholarship in their opinions. This article sets the foundation for future theoretical work on the Court's use of legal scholarship in its opinions.
Personal experiences with public officials influence how those officials are perceived. We question whether these experiential effects extend to other officials. If people draw on what they know to make inferences about unfamiliar evaluative targets, then interactions with one actor may shape evaluations of other independent actors. Focusing on police and courts, analyses of data from two surveys reveal that personal interactions with public officials produce spillover effects on appraisals of officials in different sectors. The findings indicate that experiential spillover constitutes an underappreciated force in public opinion, one that operates outside the control of the actors being evaluated.
The last decade has witnessed a significant increase in academic and journalistic interest in the United States Supreme Court's "shadow docket." Yet despite this increased interest, there exists no systematic database of the shadow docket. This paper summarizes the Supreme Court Shadow Docket Database, which we created by parsing the Journal of the Supreme Court from the 1993 through 2024 terms into individual orders. We categorize these orders into a set of usable categories, including cert denials, injunctions, summary reversals, mandamus petitions, and grant, vacate, and remands. We illustrate some potential uses of the data by examining several interesting trends in the Court's use of the shadow docket over time.
We hypothesize that the public assesses U.S. Supreme Court nominees in light of the contemporaneous Court's partisan composition. In a preregistered conjoint experiment (n = 9,895), we find that Democrats and Republicans weigh nominee partisanship more heavily when their party is losing the Court and less heavily when their party already enjoys a secure majority. Consistent with affective polarization and threat-based political psychology, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is split as when the other party enjoys a strong majority - even though the new Justice would swing the Court only in the former scenario.
We analyze nearly 70,000 New York City criminal court arraignments to examine how judges' professional backgrounds influence pretrial detention. We classify judges as having experience in law enforcement, legal services, both, or neither. Judges with law enforcement backgrounds are, on average, 3.9 percentage points more likely than others to order detention and impose cash bail. When bail is imposed, they set amounts about 32% higher. No significant differences emerge for legal services backgrounds. Because law enforcement experience is common among judges, our findings have broad implications for pretrial detention nationwide.
Lawyers play a central role in every political system in the United States. However, although lawyers are overrepresented in political office, women lawyers are underrepresented. We argue that, for men, attending law school and seeking political office aligns with broader career goals and gendered socialization patterns. We use an original survey of undergraduate social science majors to show that agentic career goals, or interest in influence, prestige, and wealth, are associated with attending law school. Data from a panel study of lawyers demonstrates that agentic goals predict political ambition. Women lawyers are less politically ambitious; agentic goals mediate this relationship.
