Alyx Mark

Stepping on Congress

Legislative enactment is only one step in the life of a law. How a law shapes public life after enactment is frequently the result of whether the judiciary interprets the provisions contained in a law and how courts reconcile provisions within and across laws. But the factors that determine whether the judiciary ends up playing such a role are not well understood. We investigate why the courts, through statutory interpretation, address some major laws but not others and why some laws are addressed soon after enactment, while others are on the books for years before they reach the judicial branch. Our evidence shows that conditions at the time of enactment, plus features of the law, play a major role in determining whether, and when, a law reaches the courts. More specifically, both divided government and disagreement between the two chambers increase the likelihood that the courts will address significant laws.

The Conditional Effectiveness of Legislative Threats: How Court Curbing Alters the Behavior of (Some) Supreme Court Justices

The separation-of-powers literature focuses on how the preferences of one branch constrain the behavior of its counterparts. Yet, in much of this work, scholars do not address how responsive behavior varies across particular members. Focusing on Court curbing legislation in Congress, we develop a model of heterogeneous responsiveness. Our theory identifies two distinct mechanisms that underpin responsiveness in judicial behavior, implying that the chief justice and the most moderate (swing) justice are more likely than their colleagues to adjust their behavior in response to external threats from Congress. We find that these two justices are significantly less likely to vote to invalidate legislation than their colleagues during periods of heightened Court curbing and provide evidence that distinct mechanisms shape their behaviors. In addition, we offer justice-specific evidence using a pre–post promotion analysis, demonstrating that Justice Rehnquist became responsive to Court curbing only after becoming chief justice. Our model highlights the micro-level underpinnings of judicial responsiveness to inter-institutional politics and, most broadly, speaks to the need for separation-of-powers models to differentiate the preferences of individual political actors when seeking to understand inter-institutional responsiveness.

Blurring Institutional Boundaries: Judges’ Perceptions of Threats to Judicial Independence

The legislature wields multiple tools to limit judicial power, but scholars have little information about how judges interpret variant threats and which they find most concerning. To provide insight, we conduct original interviews regarding legislative threats to courts with over two dozen sitting federal judges, representing all tiers of the federal judiciary. We find that judges have a nuanced understanding of threats and tend to identify components of legislative proposals that threaten formal institutional powers as more concerning than those challenging policy set by judges. This distinction has broad implications for our understanding of judicial behavior at the federal level.