This paper adds to the existing literature on en banc rehearings in two ways. First, I incorporate theoretical results from the literature on Supreme Court certiorari decisions and argue that the ideological direction of panel decisions should influence the probability of en banc rehearing only...

Judges face retention elections in over a third of US state courts of last resort and numerous lower courts. According to conventional wisdom, these elections engender judicial independence and decrease democratic accountability. We argue that in the context of modern judicial campaigns,...

A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. Despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remain relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In...