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1. Lower Court Influence on High Courts: Evidence from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

   https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2023.18  

   Bowie, Jennifer; Masood, Ali S; Savchak, Elisha C; Smith, Natalie; Wieck, Bianca; Abrams, Cameron; Melkote, Meghna (April 2024, Journal of Law and Courts)

   Clark, Tom (Ed.)

   Abstract Do lower court judges influence the content of Supreme Court opinions in the United Kingdom? Leveraging original data, we analyze opinion language adoption practices of the UK Supreme Court. We advance a theory where the justices’ choices to adopt language from lower court opinions are influenced by Supreme Court-level attributes and Court of Appeal case characteristics. We uncover compelling evidence that UK Supreme Court justices incorporate language extensively from the written opinions of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Our findings have significant implications for opinion formulation, doctrinal development, and higher and lower court interactions within comparative courts. 

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2. Accountability for Court Packing

   https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2022.14  

   Nelson, Michael J.; Driscoll, Amanda (April 2023, Journal of Law and Courts)

   How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public’s outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy’s shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will. 

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3. The Narrative of the Number: Quantification in Criminal Court

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lsi.12334  

   Lynch, Mona (February 2019, Law & Social Inquiry)
4. An Evolutionary View of the U.S. Supreme Court

   https://doi.org/10.3390/mca26020037  

   Giansiracusa, Noah (June 2021, Mathematical and Computational Applications)

   null (Ed.)

   The voting patterns of the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court continue to fascinate and perplex observers of the Court. While it is commonly understood that the division of the justices into a liberal branch and a conservative branch inevitably drives many case outcomes, there are finer, less transparent divisions within these two main branches that have proven difficult to extract empirically. This study imports methods from evolutionary biology to help illuminate the intricate and often overlooked branching structure of the justices’ voting behavior. Specifically, phylogenetic tree estimation based on voting disagreement rates is used to extend ideal point estimation to the non-Euclidean setting of hyperbolic metrics. After introducing this framework, comparing it to one- and two-dimensional multidimensional scaling, and arguing that it flexibly captures important higher-dimensional voting behavior, a handful of potential ways to apply this tool are presented. The emphasis throughout is on interpreting these judicial trees and extracting qualitative insights from them. 

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5. Trailblazer women in the Supreme Court of Canada

   https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2021.1946098  

   Johnson, Susan W; Masood, Ali S (March 2023, Politics, Groups, and Identities)

   How do judges decide issues of equality? While prior scholarship demonstrates that judicial attributes such as partisan identification, gender, race, age, and career backgrounds help elucidate judicial decision-making, considerably less attention has been devoted to how judicial empathy may influence or condition judicial decision-making. Such scholarly attention is especially lacking in the study of courts outside of the United States. To bridge this critical gap, we examine how judicial empathy affects decision-making behavior by analyzing data from the Supreme Court of Canada from 1982 to 2015. We find compelling evidence that trailblazer women’s unique personal experiences exert a strong influence on judicial behavior within the Canadian Supreme Court. In fact, our findings demonstrate that the effects of judicial empathy extend across a broader array of discrimination cases in Canada compared to previous findings on the American courts. We find that trailblazer women have a greater propensity to vote in favor of discrimination claimants compared to their male peers. Normatively, these effects manifest as judicial empathy in discrimination cases where trailblazers themselves likely faced upward mobility challenges. 

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