Banks Miller

The effect of per se recusal rules on donor behavior in judicial elections

Recent judicial decisions and political developments have elevated the issue of impartiality among elected judges as a topic of public and scholarly interest. Using a data set of all donations to candidates for the Supreme Court of Alabama from 1994 through 2010, we explore one potential proposal for limiting the appearance of judicial bias and its effects on the behavior of campaign donors—per se recusal. Our results indicate that the existence of a per se recusal statute significantly decreases the likelihood of observing large donations from several categories of donors. In auxiliary analysis, we find that attorney donors have increasingly funneled contributions through PACs since this statutes enactment—presumably, because such contributions are exempted from the law.

How Draconian Are the Changes to US Asylum Law?: A Monthly Time Series Analysis (1990–2010)

How have recent changes to US asylum law altered who gets asylum? We investigate whether the changes wrought by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Real ID Act changed the decision making of immigration judges in asylum cases. We find, contrary to much of the commentary surrounding both IIRIRA and Real ID, that immigration judges became more likely to grant applicants asylum. Furthermore, we find that those applicants who are most at-risk of persecution in the countries they are fleeing are also the applicants most likely to be granted relief—a fact that became increasingly true with the implementation of IIRIRA and Real ID.

Second-Order Evaluations of the European Court of Human Rights

Scholars have found that citizens tend to evaluate European institutions in light of how they feel about their own domestic institutions (second-order evaluations). We argue that this approach is more appropriate for understanding international courts than is the legitimacy approach of the law and courts literature. While studies applying the second-order evaluations approach have overwhelmingly focused on EU institutions, here we seek to determine whether second-order evaluations are also characteristic of citizens’ opinions about the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate our hypotheses using a sample of the British population and find strong support for the general second-order evaluation.