Is Judicial Expertise Dynamic? Judicial Expertise, Complex Networks, and Legal Policy

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Using Text as Data to Measure Latent Legal Constructs: A Dictionary-Based Approach

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

The Sources and Consequences of Political Rhetoric: Issue Importance, Collegial Bargaining, and Disagreeable Rhetoric in Supreme Court Opinions

How do political actors use rhetoric after an initial policy battle? We explore factors that lead Supreme Court justices to integrate disagreeable rhetoric into opinions. Although disagreeable language has negative consequences, we posit that justices pay this cost for issues with high personal significance. At the same time, we argue that integrating disagreeable rhetoric has a deleterious effect on the institution by reducing majority coalition size. Examining opinions from 1946 to 2011 using text-based measures of disagreeable rhetoric, we model the language of opinion writing as well as explore the consequences for coalition size. Our findings suggest serious implications for democratic institutions and political rhetoric

Is Judicial Expertise Dynamic? Judicial Expertise, Complex Networks, and Legal Policy

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Supreme Court Opinions and Audiences

This Article evaluates different rhetorical strategies Supreme Court justices employ in writing their opinions for specific audiences. Black, Owens, Wedeking, and Wohlfarth suggest justices keep lower federal courts, state governments, federal bureaucratic agencies, and the public in mind when crafting decisions, particularly to ensure compliance with the decision and avoid non-compliance. The Article identifies opinion clarity as a means of ensuring lower federal courts will follow precedent, as well as a way for smaller and less sophisticated bureaucratic agencies to avoid shirking the Court’s rulings. The Article concludes judicial clarity is only one of an arsenal of rhetorical devices used by the Supreme Court justices, and further evaluation and research may be helpful

Connecting with the Courts: Online Access to State Judicial Systems

Access to the legal system is critical in any democracy. In this article, we extend past research by exploring a new and twenty-first century dimension of access—namely, access to a state\u27s court system through its judiciary website. Using data from all fifty state judiciary websites, we find that online access is associated with the complexity and efficiency of the court system and, to a lesser extent, state-level Internet penetration and the size of the legal community, while partisan control generally has a modest or null effect. This suggests that practical or administrative considerations are more influential than political considerations when establishing online access to state courts

On Estimating Personality Traits of US Supreme Court Justices

Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a number of important methodological deficits that critically limit their usefulness. We briefly discuss what kinds of improved personality measures scholars should use instead and offer an improved set of estimates for one trait with an application that demonstrates our cautionary tale