The Institutionalization of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

This article uses an original database of confirmation hearing dialogue to examine how the Senate Judiciary Committee’s role in Supreme Court confirmations has changed over time, with particular attention paid to the 1939–2010 era. During this period, several notable developments took place, including a rise in the number of hearing comments, increased attention to nominees’ views of judicial decisions, an expansion of the scope of issues addressed, and the equalization of questioning between majority and minority party senators. We demonstrate that these changes were shaped by both endogenous and exogenous factors to promote the legitimization of the Judiciary Committee’s role in the confirmation process and to foster the instrumental goals of senators. This research contributes to our understanding of the development of political institutions, interbranch interactions, and how institutional change affects the behavior of legal and political actors

Interruptions at Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been rising since the 1980s

As scholars of the confirmation process, we aim to measure what is measurable, in the hope that data can inform our more subjective perceptions of politics. And one measurable feature of Kavanaugh’s testimony is the striking number of times he interrupted the senators to challenge their comments or force his own point. Here, the historical record can shed some light. This article reviews the history of interruptions during Supreme Court confirmation hearings from 1939 to 2010

Why not limit Neil Gorsuch — and all Supreme Court justices — to 18-year terms?

Legal scholars and political scientists increasingly question whether life tenure remains a good idea for Supreme Court justices. While scholars disagree about the exact numbers, our Supreme Court justices are serving longer and longer terms; presidents have incentives to choose younger and younger nominees; and the justices themselves appear to delay retirement in the hope of having an ideologically compatible president select their replacements. Moreover, the confirmation process has become increasingly contentious, culminating last year in Senate Republicans refusing to even grant a hearing to President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. As a result, many scholars propose a shift to staggered 18-year terms. What are the pros and cons of such a change? This article breaks down the positives and negatives of term limits for Supreme Court justices

Neil Gorsuch and the Ginsburg Rules

Supreme Court nominees testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee frequently invoke the so-called “Ginsburg Rule” to justify not answering questions posed to them. According to this “rule,” nominees during their testimony must avoid signaling their preferences about previously decided Supreme Court cases or constitutional issues. Using empirical data on every question asked and answered at every hearing from 1939–2017, we explore this “rule,” and its attribution to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We demonstrate three things. First, the Ginsburg Rule is poorly named, given that the practice of claiming a privilege to not respond to certain types of questions predates the Ginsburg nomination by decades. Second, the Ginsburg Rule really is two rules: one governing when nominees should not provide direct responses to certain types of questions, and a second governing when they should. Third, we show that Neil Gorsuch, despite his insistence to the contrary, did not really follow the example set by Justice Ginsburg. Instead, unlike Justice Ginsburg and most other recent nominees, Gorsuch regularly refused to articulate firm positions on even our most widely accepted constitutional issues and cases. In doing, we argue, Gorsuch’s practice risks diminishing one important way in which we as a society use Supreme Court confirmation hearings to debate and endorse constitutional change

The ‘Ginsburg Rule’ Is Not an Excuse to Avoid Answering the Senate’s Questions

An op-ed by Lori Ringhand and Paul M. Collins Jr. on Supreme Court nominees\u27 unwillingness to provide answers on cases under the wrongly named Ginsburg Rule. Nominees since the 1930s have balanced the competing needs of the Senate and the Judiciary by claiming a privilege to not opine on currently contested cases while freely offering their opinion about cases that used to be controversial but are no longer

Senators treat female Supreme Court nominees differently. Here’s the evidence.

Over the weekend, President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court seat left empty by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to move the nomination swiftly through to confirmation. As a result, the nation’s attention will soon turn to Barrett’s confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Based on our empirical examinations of every question asked and every answer given at the hearings since the first in 1939, here is what to expect

The Effect of Judicial Decisions on Issue Salience and Legal Consciousness in Media Serving the LGBTQ+ Community

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality

Let\u27s Talk: Judicial Decisions at Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

An investigation of Supreme Court Confirmation hearings reveals many queries posed to nominees reference specific court cases, especially recent decisions, and with questioning often divided along partisan lines. These findings indicate that the hearings are more substantive than is commonly assumed

Loose Groups of Galaxies in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey

A ``friends-of-friends'' percolation algorithm has been used to extract a catalogue of dn/n = 80 density enhancements (groups) from the six slices of the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS). The full catalogue contains 1495 groups and includes 35% of the LCRS galaxy sample. A clean sample of 394 groups has been derived by culling groups from the full sample which either are too close to a slice edge, have a crossing time greater than a Hubble time, have a corrected velocity dispersion of zero, or contain a 55-arcsec ``orphan'' (a galaxy with a mock redshift which was excluded from the original LCRS redshift catalogue due to its proximity to another galaxy -- i.e., within 55 arcsec). Median properties derived from the clean sample include: line-of-sight velocity dispersion sigma_los = 164km/s, crossing time t_cr = 0.10/H_0, harmonic radius R_h = 0.58/h Mpc, pairwise separation R_p = 0.64/h Mpc, virial mass M_vir = (1.90x10^13)/h M_sun, total group R-band luminosity L_tot = (1.30x10^11)/h^2 L_sun, and R-band mass-to-light ratio M/L = 171h M_sun/L_sun; the median number of observed members in a group is 3.Comment: 32 pages of text, 27 figures, 7 tables. Figures 1, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are in gif format. Tables 1 and 3 are in plain ASCII format (in paper source) and are also available at http://www-sdss.fnal.gov:8000/~dtucker/LCLG . Accepted for publication in the September 2000 issue of ApJ