Judicial selection and retention mechanisms have long been the targets of legal reformers. At the federal level, recurring reforms tend to focus on instituting the direct election of federal judges and setting term limits regarding judges' tenures in office. At the heart of these proposals is the idea that unelected federal judges wield too much power and use the law as little more than a means to institute their policy preferences. This is said to undermine the democratic process, causing decreased faith in the impartiality of the judiciary, which is further exacerbated by the increasingly contentious nature of the judicial confirmation process. At the state level, most of the reforms center on moving away from partisan election systems to the adoption of appointment schemes, nonpartisan elections, or merit-based systems. Underlying these proposals is the argument of reformers that partisan election systems alienate voters, resulting in decreased citizen participation in judicial elections. Moreover, state reformers posit that campaign spending has gotten out of hand, culminating in a judiciary that can be captured by powerful organized interests.

While judicial selection has garnered substantial attention from the media, interest groups, and the public, there exists only a fairly small body of academic literature that empirically examines the realities and consequences of the current selection systems at the state and federal levels. I am pleased to report that In Defense of Judicial Elections and Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations bring fresh evidence to bear on significant normative questions regarding public participation in, and impressions of, judicial selection. Individually and jointly, these books build a strong theoretical foundation for understanding the public's role in judicial selection, and provide rigorous statistical tests of their theories. In the process, these works mount strong challenges to our comprehension of the role of the public in the judicial selection process.

At the outset, it should be noted that readers familiar with the work of these teams of authors will find that many of the arguments put forward here previously appeared in journals and conference proceedings. However, these books are much more than the simple rehashing of previous work. Both offer novel empirical insights into their research foci. Moreover, these works are accessible to an audience that goes beyond the academy. Indeed, it is fair to say that these books should be required reading for anyone—lay or academic—who is serious about the current state of judicial selection in America. In this sense, they represent the finest in empirical legal scholarship: They tackle questions with significant normative and contemporary importance, work off a solid theoretical foundation, and rest their conclusions on evidence, not rhetoric.

In Defense of Judicial Elections focuses on the controversy over electing judges to state courts, with particular attention paid to partisan election systems. The modus operandi of the book is to directly confront the arguments made by judicial reformers, such as the American Bar Association and the National Center for State Courts, by subjecting the reformers' claims to empirical scrutiny. To achieve this end, Chris W. Bonneau and Melinda Gann Hall employ data on all state court-of-last-resort elections from 1990 to 2004. More specifically, the authors use two-stage Heckman models to obtain leverage over the factors that contribute to: 1) whether a state high court election witnesses at least two candidates (the first stage in all statistical models); 2) ballot roll-off (the second stage in Chapter 2); 3) campaign spending (the second stage in Chapter 3); and 4) incumbent vote share (the second stage in Chapter 4). Taken as a whole, Bonneau and Hall reach the conclusion that the data do not support the claims forwarded by judicial reformers, suggesting that proposals to alter state judicial selection mechanisms are based in rhetoric and anecdote, not generalizable facts.

For example, Bonneau and Hall find that voters in state judicial elections are motivated by the same factors that explain voter participation in nonjudicial elections. Of chief importance, they provide evidence that ballot roll-off is negatively associated with campaign spending and partisan elections. They argue that this is the case because high amounts of candidate spending increase voter awareness, while partisan elections act as an information shortcut for voters, encouraging voter participation. Thus, the allegations that partisan elections and aggressive campaigns serve to alienate voters are simply not supported by the empirical evidence. They also explore the claim that money buys judicial elections. Although they do find that relative campaign spending does contribute to a candidate's vote share (with the candidate spending the most money garnering the most votes), this is only one of the factors contributing to election success.

Following the empirical chapters, Bonneau and Hall use their findings to evaluate recent proposals and reforms relating to judicial selection in five states. Overall, they find these reforms to have been largely misguided. For example, after North Carolina moved from partisan to nonpartisan elections, voter participation decreased.

Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations addresses public perceptions of the Supreme Court, focusing primarily on the confirmation process of then-Judge Samuel Alito. James L. Gibson and Gregory A. Caldeira explore public faith in the Supreme Court through the lens of positivity bias, the idea that any event that causes individuals to turn their attention to the courts, inclusive of controversies, will reinforce citizens' perceptions of judicial legitimacy. Such is said to be the case because events that focus attention on the courts strengthen judicial legitimacy by teaching Americans the lesson that courts are different from other political actors. In this sense, this research posits that Americans subscribe to the “myth of legality” by viewing judicial decisions as grounded in the law, with little to no room for politics to operate. Because Americans subscribe to this perspective on courts, when they think about courts, they do so in a favorable light. To subject this hypothesis to empirical scrutiny, the authors utilize survey data from a variety of sources, although the most impressive evidence brought to bear is from a three-way panel survey, the first of its kind, centered on the Alito nomination.

The findings by Gibson and Caldeira are both expected and surprising. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors provide substantial evidence that Americans are much more knowledgeable about the Supreme Court than extant research suggests. In large part, the conventional view—that Americans know little about the Court—is based on flawed methodological approaches taken in public opinion polls. The authors show that once these errors are corrected, a much more positive picture of knowledge of the judiciary emerges. With regard to the central hypothesis, positivity bias, they evince that the Supreme Court enjoys a reservoir of goodwill from the public, even in the face of controversial decisions, such as Bush v. Gore (2000). Yet the public's perceptions of the Court are not entirely immune from exogenous influences. In particular, the authors demonstrate that interest-group campaigns for and against Alito damaged the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. As such, it is clear that contentious confirmation battles do have the capacity to hurt the American public's view of its most revered federal institution.

Of course, no work is without flaws. Although neither book focuses on judicial behavior per se, both present the well-established scholarly consensus that judges do not simply robotically apply the law. To the contrary, judges are policymakers whose ideologies filter into their decision making. Yet each of these works would have benefited from developing this point more fully, enhancing their accessibility to the lay reader. In addition, both analyses rely a bit too much on extant scholarship to reach their conclusions, compelling readers unfamiliar with existing work on the subjects to seek out said scholarship to address the rigor of the authors' conclusions. Methodologically, both teams of authors utilize interactions in their statistical analyses, but appear to incorrectly interpret the interactive variables as unconditional effects by focusing on the signs and significant levels of the interaction terms.

Lastly, it would have been helpful for the authors to have addressed each other's previous work more fully. To oversimplify, one might boil down Bonneau and Hall's book to reach the conclusion that the public views state court elections identically to nonjudicial elections, while one could reduce Gibson and Caldeira's book by concluding that Americans view the courts differently from other political institutions. Thus, the dichotomy. To Bonneau and Hall, courts are just another political institution. To Gibson and Caldeira, they are different from the legislative and executive branches. It would be nice to see this theoretical difference more directly addressed and resolved. Perhaps the publication of these books will motivate future researchers to rectify these conflicting perspectives on the place of courts in the American political system.

In an age when political scientists are commonly criticized by those in the legal community for shying away from research that packs a normative punch, these books are most welcome additions to the literature on courts and judges. Not only do they address questions of paramount normative significance, but they also do so by bringing rigorous empirical evidence to the table. For those who are serious about understanding judicial selection, these books have earned a position at the top of the reading list.