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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We extend cue theory to examine why and how dissent on the court below acts as a cue to apex courts in selecting the cases they hear. We posit that dissent on the court below is a cue to the apex court that the case involves complex legal issues. To test our predictions about how dissent on the court below affects the selection of cases and factors mediating and moderating this relationship, we use original data on 8,405 special leave applications to the High Court of Australia (2003–2018), finding evidence in support of cue theory.

Existing scholarship on US Supreme Court certiorari has largely centered on the demand side, prioritizing the internal motivations of justices. This approach often overlooks the broader supply-side perspective—the nature and evolution of the complete pool of petitions. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the universe of writs of certiorari from 1946 to 2019. Coding for petition date and origin, petitioner identity, and disposition, we trace the composition of petitions across eras and jurisdictions. By linking petitions to merits-stage attributes, we find that the Court’s plenary docket is selected from a geographically and organizationally uneven petition environment, that federal-origin petitions dominate both filings and the docket, and that institutional repeat players succeed at higher rates than individuals despite a steady increase in petitions from the latter. By mapping this upstream landscape, we provide a descriptive baseline and measurement framework that illuminates the dynamics of the petition supply and provides context to the demand-side accounts of Supreme Court agenda-setting.

This Research Note is an effort to lay out some ways of thinking about the relation between political time and judicial time. We have decent general descriptive theories of Supreme Court behavior when a political regime is consolidated and seemingly stable, but descriptive theories about the Court’s behavior during “transitional” periods are under-developed. The Research Note’s contribution is to identify some lines along which such theories might be developed. The analysis is highly speculative, identifying possibilities and offering anecdotal examples as illustrations. Future research into the matters discussed here will undoubtedly deepen, qualify, and refute some of those speculations.

Research that assesses individual judges’ ability to shape decisions typically focuses on courts that publish separate votes and opinions. Yet, many courts issue per curiam judgments that do not permit public dissent. To overcome this limitation, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to model the variation in judges’ expressed preferences from language in aggregated judgments. Specifically, we construct a CNN to analyze the written judgments of judge-rapporteurs and opinions of advocates-general from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Along a pro-/anti-EU dimension, we estimate how judgments differ within (1) each case relative to the advocate-general’s opinion, and (2) each judge-rapporteur, which captures how judges alter their writing across cases. Our results provide novel empirical support for theoretical models of European judicial decision-making: more pro-EU opinions driven by the Court, not the advocate-general or the judge-rapporteur, are associated with larger chambers and stronger external signals of compliance.