Since the Founding, Supreme Court justices have enjoyed life tenure. This helps insulate the justices from political pressures, but it also results in unpredictable deaths and strategic retirements determining the timing of Court vacancies. In order to regularize the appointment process, a...

Why the Supreme Court agrees to hear cases is among the most important topics in judicial politics. However, existing theories have overlooked a key factor: the relative ideologies of the litigating parties. We develop and test a new theory that explicitly incorporates the ideology of the...

The 2020 U.S. Census will, for the first time since 1950, ask about residents' citizenship status. The effect of doing so on census completion across different racial/ethnic groups is, however, unknown. We introduce the notion of contextual sensitivity to explain how seemingly innocuous...

Supreme Court justices employ law clerks to help them perform their duties. We study whether these clerks influence how justices vote in the cases they hear. We exploit the timing of the clerkship hiring process to link variation in clerk ideology to variation in judicial voting. To measure...

We study of the ideological balance of the legal academy and compare it to the ideology of the legal profession more broadly. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a...

We present a new measure of judicial ideology based on judicial hiring behavior. Specifically, we utilize the ideology of the law clerks hired by federal judges to estimate the ideology of the judges themselves. These Clerk-Based Ideology (CBI) scores complement existing measures of judicial...