Public Scholarship
"The Easiest Way for Congress to Rein in the Supreme Court.” Slate. September 11, 2023. "The 9th Circuit live-streams all of its arguments. Will that spread?” Washington Post. September 14, 2022. “The Supreme Court has more clerks and less work than 50 years ago.” Washington Post. May 16, 2022. Working Papers (please contact me for latest draft)
"Preparing Students for Undergraduate Research Experiences: Evidence from a Blended Summer Institute," with Mark Anthoney and Cassidy Branch “Democratic Norm Erosion and Supreme Court Legitimacy,” with Michael Salamone "Authoritarianism and the Supreme Court: How the justices' information environment affects decision making," with Jeff Glas (dormant) Graphic: Marquette Lawyer Fall 2015: 23. [Link]
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Peer-Reviewed Publications and Law Review Articles
"Ready for their Close-Up? Ideological Cues and Strategic Televising on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals," with Joseph Bolton. Justice System Journal 43 (3): 260-278. Federal judges offer several stated purposes for pursuing greater publicity in the judicial process, including improving the quality of reporting and educating the public. They are less candid about other goals that influence steps they take as they shape how they are perceived, including strategically using publicity to secure others' compliance, neutralize policy disagreement, or build legitimacy. Despite these judicial goals, scholars of American politics know little about how federal judges shape the public's perceptions. We leverage a notable exception to federal judges' aversion to publicizing their proceedings by analyzing how Ninth Circuit appellate judges respond to media requests to televise oral arguments. We find that the televised representation these judges present to the public is a selective one: decisions to televise appear to be motivated by portraying unanimity, while at the same time avoiding the spread of perceived politicization among the public. These results shed much-needed light on how federal judges navigate a publicity-politicization trade-off through their strategic use of televising. - Cited in written testimony from the Project On Government Oversight to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States - Research summarized in a news analysis I wrote in the Washington Post "'Unpresidented!' or: What happens when the president attacks the federal judiciary on Twitter," with Michael F. Salamone. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 18 (1): 84-100 (2021) There are many things that make Donald Trump a controversial figure in American politics, not least of which is his prominent and unorthodox use of Twitter to attack his opponents. The federal judiciary is a frequent target of the president’s ire: during his campaign and tenure as president, Trump has not hid his disdain for federal judges who disagree with him, and has on occasion taken to Twitter to express these feelings. This unprecedented form of going public provides the opportunity to shed light on the malleability of support for politically insulated institutions. We evaluate the hypothesis that Trump’s statements erode specific and diffuse support for the federal judiciary using a survey experiment in which real tweets written by the president are manipulated as the experimental treatment. We find that specific, but not diffuse, support for the Court changes in response to his attacks, but those changes are conditioned on respondents' preexisting support for democratic values. "Group Identification and Support for the Supreme Court: Evidence from Evangelical Protestants," with Joseph L. Smith and Anderson M. Starling. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58 (4): 854-873 (2019) Research on the determinants of the U.S. Supreme Court's institutional support among the public focuses on three factors at the level of the individual, including satisfaction with its performance, knowledge of the judiciary, and support for democratic values. Evidence from the group level has revealed that the relative importance of these factors can vary, despite the predictions of positivity theory that the effects of all factors should be similar across all subsets of the U.S. population. We seek to explain this inconsistency between theory and evidence through an analysis of evangelical Protestants, a politically powerful and theoretically compelling group. Drawing on group‐based studies, we develop a principled account of when group members will base their institutional support more strongly than others do on their satisfaction with the Court's recent performance, and identify defining features of the information environment of evangelical Protestants that satisfy the model's components. We report evidence from a national survey that the effects of all three major factors differ systematically for evangelical Protestants. We discuss implications of our analysis for an ongoing debate over positivity theory and for identifying other groups for whom institutional and specific support will be strongly linked. "Evaluating the Effect of Law Clerk Gender on Voting at the United States Supreme Court." Justice System Journal 38 (2): 183-201 (2017) Scholars have analyzed how those with close ties to Supreme Court justices, including family, friends, and political and legal elites, influence judicial behavior, but there are still questions about how law clerks' attributes affect their relationship to their justice. This is important because clerks' genders may affect their credibility and their ability to influence their justice's behavior when a case involves a clear gender dimension. Scholars have uncovered a great deal about the determinants and consequences of the credibility of a different set of attorneys--those who present at oral argument. I apply insights from the literature on attorney credibility to the context of law clerks, and analyze whether women enjoy greater credibility and influence in cases involving sex discrimination and abortion. I find that women influence their justice's vote on the merits, but this influence is conditional on the number of women a justice hires and the justice's ideology. This finding is robust to accounting for potential spurious factors and to balancing covariates via matching. This analysis has implications for how the justices acquire and use information from their environment to aid in their decision making. - Cited in S.E.C. v. Adams, 3:18-CV-252-CWR-FKB "Public Opinion, Public Support, and Counter-Attitudinal Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court," with Amanda C. Bryan. Justice System Journal 37 (4): 298-317 (2016) One of the foundational questions in American politics is whether and why the Supreme Court is responsive to the will of the majority. Over fifty years of scholarship has suggested a strong relationship between changes in public opinion and the ideological direction of the Court's decisions. Here we focus on a slightly different question and examine why justices, who are unelected and face little threat of their decisions being legislatively reversed, are willing to follow public opinion, even at the expense of their own ideological preferences. To this end we examine whether justices are willing to vote contrary to their preferences when those preferences are out of step with prevailing public opinion. We employ a novel issue-specific measure of public mood, and we find that justices follow public opinion to shore up broader institutional approval. But the constraint of public opinion is not static over time. Rather, justices are uniquely responsive to public opinion when public support for the Court is low or case salience is high. "U.S. Supreme Court Law Clerks as Information Sources." Journal of Law and Courts 3 (2): 277-304 (2015) Justices use information from attorneys, amici, and the solicitor general to learn about cases. One source that has gone with little empirical scrutiny is their law clerks. I validate a measure of clerk preferences and analyze the role of information conveyed by clerks in shaping the justices’ votes on the merits. I report asymmetric support for the theory that clerks get what they want when they craft credible signals: the results support the conclusion that conservative clerks can influence vote direction. These findings bolster understanding of the role of information in hierarchical relationships and shine light on clerks’ roles. - Research summarized in a news analysis I wrote in the Washington Post - Profiled on the Empirical Legal Studies blog and in the National Law Journal "Fielding an Excellent Team: Law Clerk Selection and Chambers Structure at the U.S. Supreme Court" Marquette University Law Review 98 (1): 289-311 (2014) Supreme Court justices exercise wide discretion when hiring law clerks. The justices are constrained by only the pool of qualified applicants and by norms of the institution, such as that, beginning with Chief Justice Burger's tenure in 1969, 90% of clerks have previously served a clerkship with a federal judge. Previous work finds that ideology structures hiring decisions at the individual clerk level; however, these analyses fail to account for the fact that a justice hires several clerks each term: he seek a winning team, not just a single all-star. Hiring decisions are structuring decisions in which one of a justice's goals is to assemble a team of clerks that provides him with information to aid in decision making. I analyze ideological characteristics of the teams the justices assembled from 1969-2007, and find that they frequently hire clerks with different preferences than their own. This analysis has implications for the information clerks convey to their justice and suggests that existing principal-agent models used to explain the justice-clerk relationship may be incomplete. - Cited in amicus brief by Association of American Medical Colleges for Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard - Excerpted in the Fall 2015 issue of Marquette Lawyer Other Publications "Black Robes in the Limelight: News Values and Requests to Televise Oral Arguments in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1991-2005," with Joseph Bolton. Open Judicial Politics |