Among political scientists, not only is it uncontroversial to say that judges seek to etch their
political values into law; it would be near heresy to suggest otherwise. And yet this article …

I often say that when you can mea sure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know some thing about it; but when you cannot mea sure it, when you cannot …

This paper develops a game-theoretic approach to the problem of political officials' respect
for political and economic rights of citizens. It models the policing of rights as a coordination …

At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption
that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo …

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new
perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval …

While governmental policies and institutions may remain more or less the same for years,
they can also change suddenly and unpredictably in response to new political agendas and …

From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fates
of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed …

The concept of issue salience has figured prominently in many studies of American political
life. Long lines of research have taught us that both citizens and political elites may respond …

A major focus of judicial politics research has been the extent to which ideological
divergence between the Court and Congress can explain variation in Supreme Court …

The importance of lower federal courts in the policymaking process has stimulated extensive
research programs focused on the process of selecting the judges of these courts and the …