Tom S. Clark

Partisan Labels and Democratic Accountability: An Analysis of State Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

Various literatures indicate that partisan labels increase the accountability of elected officials. Correspondingly, advocates of nonpartisan elections claim that this procedure helps liberate officials from political influence. These arguments have been prominent in recent debates regarding the selection of judges in U.S. state courts. We suggest, conversely, that on salient issues nonpartisan elections encourage popular judicial decisions, particularly given recent developments in judicial campaigns. To test this hypothesis, we assemble a dataset that revolves around state supreme courts’ decisions on abortion cases between 1980 and 2006. The analysis—which controls for a variety of factors and uses gubernatorial decisions as a comparative tool—provides strong support for the hypothesis.

Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions

Most U.S. state supreme court justices face elections or reappointment by elected officials, and research suggests that judicial campaigns have come to resemble those for other offices. We develop predictions on how selection systems should affect judicial decisions and test these predictions on an extensive dataset of death penalty decisions by state courts of last resort. Specifically, the data include over 12,000 decisions on over 2000 capital punishment cases decided between 1980 and 2006 in systems with partisan, nonpartisan, or retention elections or with reappointment. As predicted, the findings suggest that judges face the greatest pressure to uphold capital sentences in systems with nonpartisan ballots. Also as predicted, judges respond similarly to public opinion in systems with partisan elections or reappointment. Finally, the results indicate that the plebiscitary influences on judicial behavior emerge only after interest groups began achieving success at targeting justices for their decisions.

The Supreme Court's Many Median Justices

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice.

Measuring Ideological Polarization on the United States Supreme Court

The study of ideological polarization is an important topic in research ranging from behavioral-level to institutional studies of politics. Polarization, however, has received little attention in the context of the Supreme Court, even while popular press and legal commentary suggest ideological heterogeneity on the Court is consequential for the Courts policy outputs. In this article, I apply an axiomatic measure of polarization developed by Esteban and Ray (1994) to study ideological heterogeneity on the Court to develop a “polarization statistic.” I compare this method with other common polarization measures and provide evidence for the reliability of the measure.

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but decisions themselves are an act of judicial politics. Because this coverage measure is affected only after a decision is announced, using it limits the types of inferences we can draw about salience. We develop a measure of latent salience, one that builds on existing work, but that also explicitly incorporates and models predecision information. This measure has the potential to ameliorate concerns of causal inference, put research findings on sounder footing, and add to our understanding of judicial behavior.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF HIGH COURT DOCKET CONTROL FOR RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND LEGAL EFFICIENCY

A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. Despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remain relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In this article, we develop a formal model of high court resource allocation. We analyze the model under two institutional designs: (1) the Court must allocate at least some minimum effort to all cases; (2) the Court has complete discretion over which cases to hear. We analyze the model to identify the optimal allocation of resources across cases as the institutional design varies. We then consider the conditions under which the various institutional rules increase or decrease the legal efficiency, or performance, of the judicial system. Our analysis reveals the complex relationship among the institutional rules governing high court dockets, the design of the judicial hierarchy, and the performance of the legal system. We find that the effect of institutional design on legal efficiency is conditioned by the performance of the lower courts and the incentives for judicial ‘shirking’ at the High Court. While requiring some per-case effort by the High Court may marginally increase aggregate efficiency, such a requirement causes the High Court to divert resources away from the most difficult cases toward relatively easier cases. The consequence is that more difficult cases are less likely to be decided correctly, while relatively easier cases are more likely to be decided correctly. The model substantively informs policy debates among judicial reformers and scholars concerned with institutional design as well as disciplinary debates about case selection and judicial decision making.

Scope and precedent: judicial rule-making under uncertainty

I develop a formal model of Supreme Court opinion-writing in an environment of uncertainty. In particular, the model captures how the Supreme Court will optimally design the specificity of its legal rules. The model focuses on the tradeoff between more precise rules which are controlling in a smaller subset of cases against less precise rules, which have wider applicability but yield less certain outcomes. When the basic model is considered in a dynamic world in which the Court is able to hear multiple cases, it yields insights about how the factual representativeness of a case and the clarity of existing precedent jointly affect its optimal opinion-writing and willingness to hear new cases. These last implications provide theoretical foundations for theoretical and empirical questions about rule-making, case selection, and the construction of doctrine.

Towards Tracking Political Sentiment through Microblog Data

People express and amplify political opinions in Microblogs such as Twitter, especially when major political decisions are made. Twitter provides a useful vehicle for capturing and tracking popular opinion on burning issues of the day. In this paper, we focus on tracking the changes in political sentiment related to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and its decisions, focusing on the key dimensions on support, emotional intensity, and polarity. Measuring changes in these sentiment dimensions could be useful for social and political scientists, policy makers, and the public. This preliminary work adapts existing sentiment analysis techniques to these new dimensions and the specifics of the corpus (Twitter). We illustrate the promise of our work with an important case study of tracking sentiment change building up to, and immediately following one recent landmark Supreme Court decision. This example illustrates how our work could help answer fundamental research questions in political science about the nature of Supreme Court power and its capacity to influence public discourse. 1 Background and Motivation

Precedent and Doctrine in a Complicated World

Courts resolve individual disputes and create principles of law to justify their decisions and guide the resolution of future cases. Those tasks present informational challenges that affect the whole judicial process. Judges must simultaneously learn about (1) the particular facts and legal implications of any dispute; (2) discover the doctrine that appropriately resolves the dispute; and (3) attempt to articulate those rules in the context of a single case so that future courts may reason from past cases. We propose a model of judicial learning and decision making in which there is a complicated relationship between facts and legal outcomes. The model has implications for many of the important questions in the judicial process, including the dynamics of common law development, the path-dependent nature of the law, and optimal case selection by supervisory courts.

Estimating the Effect of Leisure on Judicial Performance

Normative concerns often lead designers of political institutions to insulate judges from direct accountability and oversight that creates pressure on their decision making. However, such insulation undermines performance-relevant incentives and can give rise to shirking by judges. To understand the consequences of such shirking for the judicial process, we take advantage of an annual sporting event that creates differential distractions across judges. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that when a judge’s team is participating in the NCAA Mens’ Basketball Tournament, the judge decides cases more slowly during the time the Tournament takes place. We also show those opinions are cited more negatively by subsequent decisions. These findings suggest a lack of direct accountability for their work product that is often part of political independence has deleterious consequences for the material judicial product. The findings also have implications for possible institutional design solutions.