Federal prosecutors regularly transition to private practice, where they often defend the same types of cases and clients they once prosecuted. This may be particularly true for Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in white-collar cases. Here, using data linking career trajectories to case outcomes, we examine whether AUSAs who depart for private practice treat corporate defendants differently than those who remain in government. We find “revolving” prosecutors exhibit greater leniency toward corporate defendants than their counterparts; this is clearest in cases involving big law firms. The findings speak to the revolving door’s impact on corporate accountability and career-duty tensions for prosecutors.

Detained individuals subject to deportation have the right to a bond hearing in immigration court similar to that of detained individuals accused of a crime. Unlike criminal law, immigration law places the burden of proof on detained people rather than the government. We analyze the impact of a federal court decision that shifted the burden of proof to the government via a synthetic control study and a qualitative research design grounded in a new theoretical analysis of immigration courts that focuses on judicial decision-making and prosecutorial discretion. The evidence suggests significant limits on the federal courts’ ability to change bond outcomes merely through changing the burden of proof.

Most US chief local prosecutors are elected, presenting foundational accountability questions. Prosecutors have significant incumbency advantages and wield broad discretion over criminal charges and plea deals. Our study illuminates a knowledge deficit regarding prosecutors. National and state surveys show that most Americans do not know core prosecutorial functions and cannot correctly identify their prosecutors, likely stemming from poor information provision. Among low-information respondents, job approval of prosecutors is lower compared to high-information respondents. This uncovers an accountability paradox: (1) the public knows little about prosecutors, (2) knowing less decreases prosecutor approval, but (3) most prosecutors are reelected time and again.

A decades-long debate has sought to determine whether judicial elections are detrimental to the impartiality of judges and public support for state court systems. We contribute to that discussion by assessing whether elections work to hold errant judges accountable. We use a novel dataset of judicial scandal, including newspaper reports of misconduct against elected state supreme court justices. Our data examines the effect of scandal from 2000–2023 to determine whether controversy affects voter support for incumbents. We find voters pay attention to the harmful effects of scandal on judiciaries and that impacted incumbents experience diminished support, relative to other incumbents.

An often-used normative argument for increasing judicial diversity is that it will enhance public confidence in courts. This paper tests competing perspectives about whether the descriptive representation of women in the federal judiciary will improve institutional trust, using a nationally representative survey experiment. The findings suggest that, in the post-Dobbs era, descriptive representation for gender on low visibility courts yields a positive effect on institutional trust, but that the magnitude of the effect is quite small, time limited, and restricted to Democrats and to those who already have higher levels of trust.

Backlash has become commonplace against elected officials across the United States. This is especially true for reform prosecutors, who seek to move away from traditional, tough-on-crime approaches to prosecution. How do prosecutors make sense of backlash to reform policies? How do prosecutors respond to attempts to limit their discretion, remove them from office, or otherwise inhibit their power? We draw on 68 interviews with prosecutors from 33 states and find that reform prosecutors report a chilling effect of backlash, which has pushed some out of office and forced others to carry out reforms under personally and professionally fraught conditions.

In this study, we provide a first-of-its-kind exploration of how strategic messaging by U.S. Attorneys changes during a partisan transition. We leverage original data from United States Attorney’s Office press releases that are used to inform the public about important case developments, offering a window into federal prosecutorial priorities and narratives. Using textual analysis, we examine how these political communications changed in the turnover from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration. Then, we utilize criminal case processing data to evaluate whether the content of press releases tracks with U.S. Attorney charging decisions.

Explorations of ideology retain special significance in contemporary studies of judicial politics. While some existing methodologies draw on voting patterns and coalition alignments to map a jurist’s latent features, many are otherwise reliant on supplemental proxies – often directly from adjacent actors or via assessments from various prognosticators. We propose an alternative that not only leverages observable judicial behavior, but does so through jurists’ articulations on the law. In particular, we adapt a hierarchical factor model to demonstrate how latent ideological preferences emerge through the written text of opinions. Relying on opinion content from Justices of the Supreme Court, we observe a discernible correlation between linguistic choices and latent expressions of ideology irrespective of known preferences or voting patterns. Testing our method against Martin-Quinn, we find our approach strongly correlates with this validated and commonly used measure of judicial ideology. We conclude by discussing the intuitive power of text as a feature of ideology, as well as how this process can extend to judicial actors and institutions beyond the Supreme Court.

As expectations for research output evolve, tenure portfolios serve as valuable records of how a field gauges impact. We analyze the records of 184 Law and Courts faculty at PhD-granting institutions and find that the median portfolio has grown from seven to ten peer-reviewed articles, that scholars publish in a wider variety of outlets, and that coauthorship rates have doubled over our four-decade time period. We also note patterns of gendered collaboration and private-institution advantages. These trends suggest shifting tenure expectations, complicate traditional metrics of impact, and underscore the need to initiate data-driven conversations about scholarly impact in an increasingly multidisciplinary field.

Campaign contributions – their salience, how they distribute, and their implications for political accountability and local control – have been studied extensively in the executive, legislative, and, increasingly, state judicial contexts. How reported campaign contributions vary across local prosecutor candidates as well as inform prosecutor election outcomes, however, are comparatively less well understood despite an increasing amount of campaign contributions flowing into local prosecutor elections over time. Drawing from a leading and recently released dataset that links campaign information from 3,123 local prosecutor candidates and the most recent election cycles across 2,205 districts between 2012 and 2019, this study seeks to develop an initial accounting of factors which plausibly inform local prosecutor candidates’ campaign fundraising success. To do so, the models evaluate how reported campaign contributions distribute at the individual candidate and district levels and separate contested and uncontested prosecutor elections. When it comes to campaign contribution totals, while findings from contested and uncontested election models, as expected, evidence important differences, these differences are generally stable across the candidate and district levels. Comparing findings from candidate- and district-level models, by contrast, uncovers an important difference involving incumbency status. Taken together, the findings make clear that while campaign contributions inform prosecutor election outcomes, factors that inform fundraising success vary across contested and uncontested elections as well as across candidate- and district-levels. These variations, in turn, raise important distributional concerns.

We argue affiliation with an American conservative legal movement key player, the Federalist Society (FedSoc), provides a low-cost, high-information cue to senators voting on nominees. We investigate how FedSoc affiliation shapes senator voting behavior on judicial nominations. Using a novel dataset of 35,602 roll call votes on all federal judicial nominations (1991–2020), we find Federalist Society affiliation dramatically impacts the likelihood of receiving a senator’s vote with Democrats less likely to vote for Federalist Society-affiliated nominees than Republicans across the federal judiciary. Senator ideology matters with more ideologically extreme Republicans – and more moderate Democrats – more likely to vote for FedSoc-affiliated nominees. Relatedly, Republican senators – regardless of their own affiliation with the group – reveal strong support for FedSoc affiliates. Taken together, we show nominee affiliation with the Federalist Society is a crucial cue when senators vote on judicial nominees.1

The massive prosecutorial undertaking for the January 6th insurrection prompts us to ask why Americans disapproved of punishment outcomes. We root people’s perceptions of prosecution and punishment in a threat-based understanding of the justice system, in which punishment has been used to maintain group privileges. Americans are generally supportive of punishing justice protests, but January 6th was about maintaining white and male privilege. We see opposition to January 6th punishments as patterned by an intersectional threat: a perceived challenge to racial and gendered privileges. Results suggest direct and interactive roles for racial and gendered threats on disapproval of prosecutorial punishments.1

A large empirical literature examines how judges’ traits affect how cases get resolved. This literature has led many to conclude that judges matter for case outcomes. But how much do they matter? Existing empirical findings understate the true extent of judicial influence over case outcomes since standard estimation techniques hide some disagreement among judges. We devise a machine learning method to reveal additional sources of disagreement. Applying this method to the Ninth Circuit, we estimate that at least 38% of cases could be decided differently based solely on the panel they were assigned to.

Prosecutors play a pivotal role in the American criminal justice system, exercising broad discretion over charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations. Yet despite their significant influence, we know surprisingly little about how the public perceives prosecutors – or the conditions under which trust in them is earned or lost. Building on research on political trust and leveraging new, granular survey evidence, we argue that public confidence in prosecutors is shaped by three interacting domains: (1) ideological identity and background characteristics; (2) orientations toward government and legal institutions; and (3) social dynamics – especially political efficacy and social capital. Our analysis shows that these forces jointly structure trust through multiple pathways, clarifying when and why prosecutorial legitimacy is strengthened or undermined. This framework offers concrete benchmarks for understanding variation in trust across communities and for evaluating reforms amid sustained scrutiny of the criminal justice system.

Do oral arguments influence state supreme courts, and if so, how? Focusing on a “thinking-fast” framework, this study analyzes 2014–2021 New York Court of Appeals oral arguments to test whether non-traditional factors such as expressed emotion can shape decisions. Empirical analysis drawn from textual data shows that oral arguments can explain decision-making, and that justices’ emotion during arguments likely plays a role. The findings challenge normatively rational models of judicial behavior by underscoring affective, real-time influences and highlight oral arguments as a consequential stage in subnational adjudication. This is the first evidence of their meaningful role in state supreme courts.

In this article, we marshal an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how judges reference expert-produced scientific information from the forensic science field in their written opinions in criminal cases. We argue judges turn to this expert information to guide decision-making since they are not trained in forensic science, yet this information is often important in criminal cases. We find judges use authoritative language when referencing national forensic reports benefiting the defense but the relationship between references benefiting the prosecution and judges’ use of authoritative language is less straightforward. The findings provide insight into the way judges interact with expert information.

This paper presents empirical evidence that Supreme Court voting on stays and injunctions is associated with justices’ expected preferences for resolving the merits. This result is especially pronounced when the merits remain pending before a lower court. Combined with a largely overlooked recent shift in the procedural context in which these applications arise, the latter finding helps explain increased decision salience and controversy. Emphasizing procedural context also sharpens inference about institutional performance, focuses normative proposals to enhance reason giving, and illustrates how undifferentiated conceptual labels such as shadow docket, emergency docket, and interim docket obscure important variation.

Lawyers play a central role in every political system in the United States. However, although lawyers are overrepresented in political office, women lawyers are underrepresented. We argue that, for men, attending law school and seeking political office aligns with broader career goals and gendered socialization patterns. We use an original survey of undergraduate social science majors to show that agentic career goals, or interest in influence, prestige, and wealth, are associated with attending law school. Data from a panel study of lawyers demonstrates that agentic goals predict political ambition. Women lawyers are less politically ambitious; agentic goals mediate this relationship.

We analyze nearly 70,000 New York City criminal court arraignments to examine how judges’ professional backgrounds influence pretrial detention. We classify judges as having experience in law enforcement, legal services, both, or neither. Judges with law enforcement backgrounds are, on average, 3.9 percentage points more likely than others to order detention and impose cash bail. When bail is imposed, they set amounts about 32% higher. No significant differences emerge for legal services backgrounds. Because law enforcement experience is common among judges, our findings have broad implications for pretrial detention nationwide.

Senatorial scrutiny of judicial nominees has long centered on the role of confirmation hearings in advice and consent, but senators draw on multiple sources of information when evaluating nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Questions for the Record (QFRs) – written questions submitted to nominees after the conclusion of their hearings – are a common yet understudied component of the Judiciary Committee’s vetting process. I analyze the use of QFRs for all Circuit Court of Appeals nominees from 2001 to 2022, finding that partisan differences between the nominating president and senator strongly structure who submits them, while interest group opposition to a nominee, though significant, plays a more modest role than it does in senators’ question-asking behavior during confirmation hearings. Moreover, senators’ use of QFRs has increased substantially in recent sessions of Congress, especially following reforms to the filibuster in 2013. These findings suggest that QFRs are not simply an extension of hearing questions. Instead, they serve their own vetting functions for Committee senators, particularly for outpartisans, those highly engaged in the process, and when time constraints may limit other means of vetting.