The Best for Last: The Timing of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

This Article investigates the hypothesis that the most important and, often, controversial and divisive cases—so called big cases—are disproportionately decided at the end of June. We define a big case in one of four ways: front-page coverage in the New York Times; front-page and other coverage in four national newspapers (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune); the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in a case; and the number of subsequent citations by the Supreme Court to its decision in a case. We find a statistically significant association between each measure of a big case and end-of-term decisions even after controlling for the month of oral argument (cases argued later in the term are more likely to be decided near the end of the term) and case attributes (e.g., dissents and concurrences) that increase the time it takes to decide a case. We also speculate on why big cases cluster at the end of the term. One possibility is legacy and reputational concerns: when writing what they think will be a major decision, the Justices and their law clerks take more time polishing until the last minute with the hope of promoting their reputations. Another is that the end-of-term clustering of the most important cases may tend to diffuse media coverage of and other commentary regarding any particular case, and thus spare the Justices unwanted criticism just before they leave Washington for their summer recess

Some Thoughts on the Study of Judicial Behavior

Back in the 1940s the political scientist C. Herman Pritchett began tallying the votes and opinions of Supreme Court Justices. His goal was to use data to test the hypothesis that the Justices were not only following the “law,” but were also motivated by their own ideological preferences. With the hindsight of nearly eighty years, we know that Pritchett’s seemingly small project helped to create a big field: Judicial Behavior, which I take to be the theoretical and empirical study of the choices judges make. Political scientists continue to play a central role, but they are now joined by economists, psychologists, historians, and legal academics. I briefly explore their contributions. I also consider other developments since Pritchett’s time, including the analysis of judicial behavior abroad, the massive improvements in our data, and the increasing number of topics under study. I conclude with some directions the field might take in the next few years. All in all, I am quite optimistic that the study of judicial behavior will continue to hold an important place in the social sciences, history, and, increasingly, I hope, law

Shedding (Empirical) Light on Judicial Selection

Relative to commentators at Political Science and Economics meetings, the discussants at law conferences are generally quite kind, genteel even. They almost always say, This is a really wonderful set of papers - even if the papers are not so wonderful - or that they really learned a lot from the papers - even if they didn\u27t. Happily, with regard to the three papers the organizers asked me to discuss,\u27 I need not stretch the truth for purposes of collegiality. I really do think they are a wonderful set of papers and really did learn a lo

On the Effective Communication of the Results of Empirical Studies, Part II

While law professors are increasingly making use of data in their scholarship and while the data work housed in their studies is (generally) of a high quality, they have been less effective at communicating the products of their labor. A strong devotion to tabular, rather than graphical, displays, and claims about statistical significance rather than substantive importance, are just two areas requiring improvement. Here, as in Part I, we attempt to adapt a burgeoning literature in the social and statistical sciences to the unique interests of legal scholars. Our proposals are many in number, but none is particularly difficult to implement. More to the point, we believe that law professors should want to implement them. If other fields are any indication, moving toward more appropriate and accessible presentations of data will heighten the impact of empirical legal scholarship regardless of the audience-no doubt a desirable goal in a discipline that rightfully prides itself on its contributions to forming legal and public policy

A variation of McShane's identity for 2-bridge links

We give a variation of McShane's identity, which describes the cusp shape of a hyperbolic 2-bridge link in terms of the complex translation lengths of simple loops on the bridge sphere. We also explicitly determine the set of end invariants of $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$-characters of the once-punctured torus corresponding to the holonomy representations of the complete hyperbolic structures of 2-bridge link complements.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figure