Courts in new democracies sometimes encounter challenges in gaining public trust, even after achieving judicial independence. This study examines how judicial communication can help build trust in the judiciary. Specifically, I address two questions regarding judicial communication: first, what motivates judges to engage in communication, and second, how this communication influences the public’s trust in the judiciary. I argue that members of a judiciary engage in communication to protect the judiciary’s reputation and that this communication fosters the public’s trust in the judiciary. This is because improved communication enhances the public’s understanding of the courts. To test my theoretical argument, I analyze a unique judicial reform in Taiwan, where a public-oriented communication strategy using social media was introduced. Using in-depth interviews with members of the judiciary and a difference-in-differences design, I find that, first, judges seek to protect judicial reputation by adopting a communication strategy characterized by information clarity and accessibility. Second, individuals more likely to be exposed to this communication, particularly frequent digital users, demonstrate increased judicial trust. My findings have implications for how courts in new democracies can use communication strategies to bolster judicial trust.

An often-used normative argument for increasing judicial diversity is that it will enhance public confidence in courts. This paper tests competing perspectives about whether the descriptive representation of women in the federal judiciary will improve institutional trust, using a nationally representative survey experiment. The findings suggest that, in the post-Dobbs era, descriptive representation for gender on low visibility courts yields a positive effect on institutional trust, but that the magnitude of the effect is quite small, time limited, and restricted to Democrats and to those who already have higher levels of trust.

A decades-long debate has sought to determine whether judicial elections are detrimental to the impartiality of judges and public support for state court systems. We contribute to that discussion by assessing whether elections work to hold errant judges accountable. We use a novel dataset of judicial scandal, including newspaper reports of misconduct against elected state supreme court justices. Our data examines the effect of scandal from 2000–2023 to determine whether controversy affects voter support for incumbents. We find voters pay attention to the harmful effects of scandal on judiciaries and that impacted incumbents experience diminished support, relative to other incumbents.

We argue that negative references to amicus curiae briefs in high court judgments – instances where a court explicitly signals disagreement with the legal arguments in such briefs – are a significant and understudied feature of judicial reasoning. We theorize that such references may provide courts with a tool for increasing the precision of its case law, fostering its legitimacy, and increasing compliance pressure. Our empirical analysis of the Court of Justice of the European Union indicates that negative references are used both to boost its legitimacy and to specify not only what the law is, but what it is not.

Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet what if some advocates are treated differently before the Court solely because of aspects of their identity? In this work, we leverage a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates at both the Court-level and the justice-level. Examining nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect that dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates.

We argue that the controversial Barrett appointment and President Trump’s norm-violating rhetoric posed risks to the Supreme Court’s ability to generate acceptance of a 2020 election intervention. We fielded four nationally-representative survey experiments to measure the Court’s ability to generate public acceptance of an election intervention across key events during the election period. Results show that public acceptance changed substantially across events. The Court lacked the ability to induce acceptance, particularly among Democrats, after the election. Only after the Court dismisses the Republican-led election challenge does acceptance rebound. The Court’s ability to generate public acceptance regarding election disputes appears tenuous.

In this research, we examine redistricting plan review by state supreme courts to determine what factors influence party-aligned voting in judicial decisions. We analyze whether judicial selection systems matter, as well as the ideological extremism of judges. Our judge-level data includes votes on redistricting cases heard across the American states from 1961 to 2022. We find that judges who are ideologically extreme are more likely to cast party-aligned votes, but only when selected by appointment with life tenure or by partisan elections.

Black legal theorists often believe White Americans see Black judges as incapable of deciding racial issues fairly. Using a survey experiment, we examine this by studying perceptions of Black and White judges’ fairness through racial threat and group consciousness. Results show race consistently influences Black Americans’ evaluations of judges, with Black respondents viewing Black judges as fairer on racial issues. For White respondents, race only affects their views of judges in the context of racial resentment, otherwise playing no significant role. These results highlight the complex interplay of race in judicial evaluations.

Most Supreme Court (SCOTUS) clerk studies explore selection, or impact, during the clerkship. The existing research examining the benefits of clerking for those returning to the Court suggests relational expertise from clerking for a specific justice, not process expertise from the clerkship, enhances SCOTUS oral argument success. Our study suggests the benefits of prior appellate clerkships likely stem from both relational and process expertise. Specifically, justices tend to favor parties represented by former US Court of Appeals (USCA) clerks who never clerked for the SCOTUS and prior SCOTUS clerks, even when the clerk did not serve in the justice’s chambers.

This is a case study of Guatemala’s judicial system, initially designed to be a pluralist model in 1984. However, it is now captured by political entrepreneurs who are undermining liberal democracy. The research warns about similar risks in other young democracies and explains the pitfalls of judicial councils and capturable courts. Although judiciaries are now seen as safeguards against authoritarianism, this study demonstrates how they can be subverted. Unlike authoritarian populists who weaken judicial institutions through popular support, this case shows how entrepreneurs rely on intimidation and capture. Using data of the growth of lawyers, I propose the entrepreneurs outnumbered the elites committed to democracy and captured the nomination process in favor of uncommitted elites leading to democratic backsliding.

Popular insurance models of judicial independence contend that electoral competition induces executives to establish or maintain independence as insurance against the risks associated with losing office. Existing accounts, however, focus only on variation in the likelihood of losing office, treating risks associated with losing as constant. This inattention to the model’s causal logic limits theoretical development and empirical conclusions. We model the demand for insurance rather than simply the likelihood of losing office, with empirical implications tested via instrumental variables. This paper offers a major development of the insurance account, with important implications for the study of judicial independence.

What factors explain compliance with monetary damages awarded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)? States comply with the payment of monetary damages at higher rates than other forms of reparation. However, the higher compliance rate belies the significant variation in time to compliance with the payment of monetary awards. We identify three case-level characteristics that explain this variation: size of awards, number of victims, and victim identity. We test our hypotheses utilizing original datasets on compliance with monetary damages and case characteristics in IACtHR judgments through 2019, and find support for all three factors on time to compliance.

Much of the research on public trust in courts focuses on countries with strong rule of law traditions and clear judicial norms. Less is known about such attitudes in young democracies with developing judicial institutions. To address this, we examine public confidence in Ghana’s court system. Ghana’s courts have faced various scandals, from judges’ personal conduct to separation of power conflicts. Using Afrobarometer data, we evaluate public attitudes toward Ghana’s courts. We find that Ghanaians generally have low trust in their courts, with factors such as partisanship, education, standard of living, and gender strongly influencing trust.

How might constitution-makers write “transformative constitutions”? Scholars and policymakers have looked to constitutional design as a mechanism for societal change, for example, promoting democracy, equality, and social rights. In these efforts, accountability has most often been limited to government actors. Yet, constitution-makers are increasingly introducing the “horizontal” application of rights, a potent tool for transformation whereby private actors also gain constitutional rights obligations. We argue that a key predictive element in introducing this mechanism is a meeting of the minds in constitution-making processes, where interests and mutual commitments from a broad cross-section of society are expressed at the negotiating table. We test our theory, employing cross-national data concerning the adoption of horizontal application over time, and examples from specific countries’ experiences. Our findings support our theory, suggesting that powerful articulation of interests by expert professionals in inclusive processes is a significant factor in reshaping citizen duties and, thus, transforming society.

The majority opinion of the Supreme Court establishes precedent, but separate opinion writing affords the justices the ability to expound upon it or express their disagreement with the ruling or its logic. We broaden the exploration of separate opinion writing to consider how decisions and case features at the moment of granting cert shape justices’ decisions to engage in nonconsensual behavior. We also sharpen the focus on external actors to consider the nature of amici curiae. Through an empirical study of Supreme Court cases between 1986 and 1993, we find that aspects of the agenda-setting stage affect justices’ decisions at the litigation stage. In addition, we find that the number of briefs and the diversity of organized interests impacted by the case is particularly relevant to justices. The decision to write a separate opinion is the product of internal and external factors over the full course of a case’s history.

Since 1974, two out of every five constitutions (40.3%) were prepared via processes that included public consultation. The reasons for adopting these participatory mechanisms, however, are largely unexplored. I argue that public consultation is a tool for elite contestation of power. Introducing an original dataset of public consultations in constitution-making processes from 1974–2021 (n = 300), I find that in democracies, factional majorities and newcomer elites use public consultation to legitimate a break from the status quo. In autocracies, governing coalitions that depend on performance and enjoy greater party institutionalization push for public consultation to preserve favorable power-sharing arrangements.

Proposals to change the institutional features of national high courts have been on the agenda recently in the United States and Israel. Using insights about endowment effects and prospect theory from behavioral economics, we theorize about how citizens may think about benefits from high courts and how those views can influence their support for change to those institutions. Mindful of differences across these countries, we employ a comparative experimental design to explore how people think about personal and societal benefits emanating from the Israeli and United States Supreme Courts. We find interesting differences in how experimental participants think about benefits from courts and how those views shape feelings about recent proposals to alter judicial institutions in each national context.

Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.

International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to hold accountable, exposing them to potential retaliation for attempting to constrain their behavior. As governments’ response to adverse decision-making is often conditional on public support, we explore whether citizens actually support international courts’ judicial power over questions of democracy. We argue that citizens’ support for this form of judicial power depends on their democratic values and their desire for institutional checks and balances against the executive. Furthermore, we contest that this support is conditional on partisanship, with this relationship holding for opposition partisans while government partisans are generally opposed to international courts’ judicial power. We support our expectations using original survey data collected from Hungary before their 2022 national legislative elections, and examining citizens’ support for judicial power for the Court of Justice of the European Union.

How can citizens in authoritarian regimes exercise oversight of the legal system? I examine police and court monitoring, bottom-up oversight activities popular in pre-war Russia (2012–2022). Monitoring pushes the state to honor commitments it has made in its own laws, taking advantage of the authoritarian state’s need for information and legitimacy. Yet monitoring activities are not just about improving the state’s performance. Using interviews, participant observation and document analysis of monitoring campaigns in pre-war Russia, I argue that monitoring can empower citizens in a profoundly disempowering environment, perhaps its most important legacy in a closing authoritarian space.