How states learn from the success or failure of other states’ laws in federal courts.

Why make the same mistakes as those who have gone before you? In new research into state lawmaking, Rachael K. Hinkle finds that legislators often put that principle into practice. She finds that when the Supreme Court rules that a state’s law is constitutional, it is 27 percent more likely that another state will adopt that same type of law. In addition, using software originally designed to detect plagiarism, she also uncovers that these other states will borrow up to 7 percent of the law’s text, a probability which triples if a state’s own federal circuit court declares the law to be constitutional

Rachael K. Hinkle, Unintended Consequences. How the Publication Norm as a Tool of Compromise Reduces the Influence of Female and Minority Judges

Even when women and people of color achieve positions of political power, that does not guarantee they will be able to wield the same amount of influence as similarly-situated white men. Institutional norms may combine with social constructions of difference to create a system in which power is distributed disproportionately. Such a pattern is evident in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Benign procedural practices and laudable deliberative processes combine with divergent viewpoints generated by fundamentally different social experiences to create a system in which power is exercised unequally

The Role of the U.S. Courts of Appeals in Legal Development: An Empirical Analysis

What are the causes and consequences of legal development? In recent years courts scholars have begun to address these broad and challenging questions, yet there is still much work to be done. The intermediate level of the federal court system: a.k.a., circuit courts) provides an institutional context replete with opportunities to extend our theoretical and empirical understanding of legal development. My dissertation takes advantage of these opportunities in three ways. First, I explore legal constraint by comparing citation to and treatment of circuit court precedents. A precedent is binding in its own circuit, but merely persuasive in other circuits. Consequently, if law constrains judges the effect of ideology on how a precedent is treated should be significantly less when it is considered in its own circuit than when considered by a sister circuit. Second, I investigate the nuances of a circuit\u27s citation to its own binding precedent to determine how it is influenced by strategic anticipation of whether a case will be reviewed and overturned by the entire circuit. Third, I examine the impact of federal courts on state policy discussion, positing that both adoption and content of a policy will be influenced by federal court rulings on the constitutionality of a previously adopted statute

How one circuit court judge can stop a higher court from establishing a legal precedent

Not all legal cases establish a legal precedent – federal circuit court appeal opinions often go unpublished and thus only apply to the dispute in question. In new research, Morgan L.W. Hazelton, Rachael K. Hinkle, and Jee Seon Jeon find that the decision whether or not to publish such opinions can have an influence on whether a judge issues a dissent from the majority. If the circuit court is substantially different ideologically from a higher court, judges can pre-emptively silence a dissenting opinion by deciding that it will not be published, thus negating the chance that their decision will be reviewed by a higher court

The Long and the Short of It: The Influence of Briefs on Outcomes in the Roberts Court

This Article considers the role of information, affected groups, and persuasion in the connection between justice votes and the content of briefs in the Roberts Court. Hazelton, Hinkle, and Spriggs shed new light on the previously observed finding that the side with the most briefs is more likely to win. The authors find that the true advantage lies in providing the Court with a greater amount of information overall, and that holding total information constant, a greater number of briefs is, surprisingly, a disadvantage

Rachael K. Hinkle, Unintended Consequences. How the Publication Norm as a Tool of Compromise Reduces the Influence of Female and Minority Judges

Even when women and people of color achieve positions of political power, that does not guarantee they will be able to wield the same amount of influence as similarly-situated white men. Institutional norms may combine with social constructions of difference to create a system in which power is distributed disproportionately. Such a pattern is evident in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Benign procedural practices and laudable deliberative processes combine with divergent viewpoints generated by fundamentally different social experiences to create a system in which power is exercised unequally

Legal Constraint in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

These data show when and how U.S. Court of Appeals judges cite existing published circuit precedents when writing panel opinions. Specifically these data cover the use of all such precedents dating back to 1953 and the citation decisions themselves are examined for cases from 1990 through 2010. Both treatment cases and precedents are limited to search and seizure cases that cite the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution. In addition to the information on citation and treatment, the relevant databases contain several variables describing features of the treatment case, the precedent, and the relationship between those two. The provided Stata .do file contains the code necessary to produce all the numerical results in the associated article as well as conduct ancillary analyses mentioned in the endnotes

Of Whites and men: How gender and race impact authorship of published and unpublished opinions in the US courts of appeals

While authorship assignment has been studied extensively in the US Supreme Court, relatively little is known about such decisions in the intermediate federal courts. Moreover, what we know about circuit courts relates only to published opinions (those which constitute precedent under the doctrine of stare decisis and, thus, influence policy). Little is known about authorship of less influential unpublished opinions. Distinguishing between the costs, benefits, and risks inherent in authoring published versus unpublished opinions, we develop and test theoretical expectations about how demographic characteristics of opinion assignors and assignees influence authorship across opinion type. We conduct empirical tests using an exhaustive original dataset containing all authored dispositive circuit panel opinions issued in 2012. The results reveal that White and male judges are more likely to assign White and male judges to write published opinions and less likely to assign them to write unpublished opinions. The substantive sizes of the discrepancies are somewhat modest, but our results indicate that judges from historically disadvantaged groups have fewer opportunities to shape policy and they shoulder a disproportionately larger share of the routine chore of resolving individual cases

IdentityPRQ_Appendices_online_supp – Supplemental material for The Intergroup Foundations of Policy Influence

<p>Supplemental material, IdentityPRQ_Appendices_online_supp for The Intergroup Foundations of Policy Influence by Rachael K. Hinkle and Michael J. Nelson in Political Research Quarterly</p

On Replication and the Study of the Louisiana Supreme Court

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116256/1/gj10.pd