Felon disenfranchisement laws can alter the composition of the electorate. Accordingly, we argue that in states with such laws, elected prosecutors may be tempted to assign felon status strategically. We test our argument using criminal case data from Virginia and leveraging a sudden policy change—unexpectedly announced by the Governor on April 22, 2016—enfranchising all felons upon completion of their prison or probation sentence. Using well-known racial differences in partisanship as a measure of likely political alignment, we show that the announcement corresponded to an increase in criminal charge severity and sentence length for defendants who were politically unaligned with their prosecutors, and a decrease for aligned defendants. Evidence suggests that these changes may have been partially motivated by partisan concerns in the lead-up to the 2016 federal elections.

This article examines how the Constitutional Courts of Lithuania and Latvia manage tensions between the security obligations under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the human rights commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights. While both courts recognize state security obligations as legitimate justifications for state-secrets governance, the Lithuanian Court’s earlier development of ECHR-grounded constitutional jurisprudence prior to its NATO accession has produced more rights-protective outcomes than the Latvian Court in the domain of state-secrets governance. However, the Latvian Court afforded a higher level of rights protection following the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in Ternovskis v. Latvia (2014). Building upon the case study, I advance a path-dependent thesis: prior internalization of ECHR norms creates a self-reinforcing framework that structures the function of security obligations in constitutional adjudication, while constitutional courts that lack this prior framework require an external shock to achieve similar results. Furthermore, this article identifies constitutional courts as pivotal sites of transnational norm harmonization: they construct the hierarchical framework through which multiple international obligations are organized within the domestic constitutional system, facilitating national policies and the operation of international organizations whose obligations are so ordered.

Judges may express underlying political preferences when speaking that can only be captured with audio and not text. Yet, it is unclear if audio or video recordings of judicial proceedings shape high courts’ legitimacy differently than written transcripts. We address this question with two survey experiments using short, real-world case excerpts from the US and UK. In sum, we do not find evidence that the method of delivery is associated with evaluations of court legitimacy as predicted by past studies. These null results persist when we account for the emotions that judges convey, perceived political inclinations of judges, and participants’ political preferences. Our findings offer novel insight into the relationship between high court attitudes and the medium through which judicial decisions are communicated.

Following pressure from investors, Congress passed the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) to facilitate lawsuits by nonstate commercial actors against sovereign states in US courts. This legislation redefined sovereign debt as a commercial activity, seemingly favoring creditors. Yet case outcomes proved variable. While the FSIA established clear procedural guidelines, judicial discretion remained, raising questions about what factors influence outcomes. How deep is the effect of judges’ partisan leanings? To what extent does a left–right divide exist in this issue area? Although sovereign debt of other countries rarely sparks US political debate, I argue that partisan influence persists in these cases, particularly when defendants are democracies. Republican-nominated judges consistently apply the FSIA’s pro-creditor framework regardless of defendant characteristics, reflecting their party’s historical support for transnational commercial actors and contract enforcement. Democratic-nominated judges, however, exhibit conditional deference: when democracies demonstrate fiscal restraint before defaulting—signaling genuine economic distress—Democratic-nominated judges more readily defer to the sovereign defendant within the FSIA’s constraints. When democracies maintain high government consumption while defaulting, suggesting strategic choice rather than necessity, Democratic-nominated judges enforce more strictly. By contrast, both Democratic- and Republican-nominated judges converge on pro-creditor positions when adjudicating autocratic defaults because the absence of credible fiscal signals eliminates conditions for conditional deference. I test this argument with an original data set of sovereign debt litigation cases brought to the United States from 1977 to 2022.

We hypothesize that the public assesses U.S. Supreme Court nominees in light of the contemporaneous Court’s partisan composition. In a preregistered conjoint experiment (n = 9,895), we find that Democrats and Republicans weigh nominee partisanship more heavily when their party is losing the Court and less heavily when their party already enjoys a secure majority. Consistent with affective polarization and threat-based political psychology, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is split as when the other party enjoys a strong majority – even though the new Justice would swing the Court only in the former scenario.

State judicial elections in the United States have become increasingly expensive, raising concerns about the influence of campaign contributions on judicial impartiality. This study examines individual donations – specifically from attorneys, non-attorneys, and business donors – in state supreme court elections from 2000 to 2023. The analysis reveals that attorneys predominantly support candidates with judicial experience and Democratic affiliation, while non-attorneys and business donors favor Republican candidates and high-profile races. These patterns underscore distinct motivations among donor groups and offer insights into the evolving dynamics of judicial campaign finance.

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.

This review essay documents research on state courts throughout the last 25 years, tracking many of the important changes affecting state courts. Since State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ) began publication in 2001, research on state courts has evaluated a diverse range of topics, including traditionally important areas like the decisions of state judges, the effectiveness of elections for promoting accountability, public attitudes toward state courts, and judicial diversity, among other lines of study. In this essay, we describe the continued development of state courts research – noting further refinement to our understanding of state courts and the development of exciting research avenues. We first present an overview of state courts research and then discuss scholarly efforts to explain the emergence of new-style judicial campaigns, as well as the defense of judicial elections that formed within the subdiscipline. From there, we describe the current state of the state courts research and address research areas in need of attention. We note the important contributions of SPPQ to the advancement of the state courts subfield, which has published more than 50 law and courts articles since its founding. By capitalizing on the methodological and substantive advantages that come from comparative inquiry, scholars have successfully addressed many important questions and challenges involving state courts.

State supreme courts, long White and male, are increasingly diverse in recent years. As a result, a growing literature explores how various minority groups reach the bench. Interim appointments, occurring when governors in electoral states appoint someone to fill a midterm vacancy, are largely absent from this literature. This is problematic because, in states utilizing judicial elections, nearly half of all jurists initially receive an interim appointment. This subsequently conveys an incumbency advantage and may bypass women’s and racial minorities’ lower propensity to seek and secure office. Indeed, interim appointments are crucial to court diversification. Since appointment predictors vary by identity, we explore the path members of several groups take to the bench. We do so by drawing on a dataset of every jurist joining electoral state supreme courts from 1980 to 2023. We argue non-traditional jurists’ interim appointments are conditional on the governor’s political affiliation, institutional constraints, and the broader political context. We find Democrats are generally more likely to appoint non-traditional jurists, although both institutional and political factors are important moderators. Additionally, appointment predictors vary by identity group. Our findings underscore the nuanced ways state supreme courts become more diverse and the conditions under which governors appoint non-traditional jurists to the bench.

This article examines how judicial legitimacy in adversarial systems is fundamentally shaped by institutional constraints by arguing that courts inherit legitimacy deficits from investigative, prosecutorial, and post-judicial actors. Rather than viewing legitimacy as court-generated, I introduce the concept of “legitimacy transfer” to explain how deficits at one institutional stage structurally constrain courts’ capacity to generate public trust through their own actions alone. Using Malaysia’s corruption cases as a critical case study, it demonstrates how judicial legitimacy is fundamentally shaped by entire legal process from initial investigations through prosecutorial decisions to post-judicial mechanisms. The analysis reveals how investigative thoroughness, prosecutorial independence, and post-judicial mechanisms like royal pardons or executive clemency might significantly impact public trust in judicial outcomes. This reconceptualization suggests that in adversarial systems, strengthening judicial legitimacy requires a holistic approach addressing the entire legal process rather than focusing only on the court.

The article discusses the unfolding of the anticorruption campaign in Romania, from pre-accession to present day. Its argument is that the risk-induced anticorruption paradigm has produced effects that have been from the very beginning irreconcilable with liberal-constitutional normativity. To generate results, normative understandings regarding fundamental rights, institutional autonomy, and judicial independence were subordinated to the policy imperatives and manipulated to achieve them. In the long run, normative considerations resurfaced as a backlash, in equally distorted and instrumental forms. I argue that a single-minded pursuit of policy imperatives thought conducive to risk-abatement has not only not reduced or managed the risk of corruption but also has generated more intractable, systemic threat patterns. Some of these paradoxical, unintended consequences are not contained, resulting in normative spillover within the common constitutional area. The first part of my paper discusses the politicisation of the judicial system. A second substantive section analyses the protracted saga of judicial salaries and pensions and repeated attempts to manipulate the retirement conditions in order to generate personnel and policy changes. A third probes into the dialogues between the CJEU, the Romanian Constitutional Court and the High Court of Cassation and Justice regarding the statute of limitations and its implications.

This article examines the incentives, strategies, and constraints faced by judicial entrepreneurs in advancing bankruptcy enforcement—a legal area traditionally considered politically sensitive—in Wenzhou, China. While existing studies on Chinese courts emphasize external and institutional factors, this study argues that judicial entrepreneurs can play a pivotal role in driving reforms. In response to the 2011 private lending crisis, Wenzhou court leaders promoted bankruptcy as a means of resolving failing firms. They began with pilot cases and gradually institutionalized bankruptcy by mobilizing social, judicial, and political resources. These efforts were shaped by both personal attributes and self-serving interests. However, judicial entrepreneurship encountered limits, such as legal rules, the inconsistency of enforcement, and the government’s core interests. The study contributes to the debates on courts and social change by showing how court leaders can overcome institutional constraints through alliance building, public engagement, and local adaptation of national rules. It also enriches our understanding of judicial policymaking across regimes by highlighting a symbiotic, rather than a zero-sum, state-court relationship in the analysis of judicial politics.

The number of constitutional courts and supreme courts with constitutional review rights has strongly increased with the third wave of democratisation across the world as an important element of the new constitutionalism. These courts play an important role in day‐to‐day politics as they can nullify acts of parliament and thus prevent or reverse a change in the status quo. In macro‐concepts of comparative politics, their role is unclear. Either they are integrated as counter‐majoritarian institutional features of a political system or they are entirely ignored: some authors do not discuss their potential impact at all, while others dismiss them because they believe their preferences as veto players are entirely absorbed by other actors in the political system. However, we know little about the conditions and variables that determine them as being counter‐majoritarian or veto players. This article employs the concept of Tsebelis’ veto player theory to analyse the question. It focuses on the spatial configuration of veto players in the legislative process and then adds the court as an additional player to find out if it is absorbed in the pareto‐efficient set of the existing players or not. A court which is absorbed by other veto players should not in theory veto new legislation. It is argued in this article that courts are conditional veto players. Their veto is dependent on three variables: the ideological composition of the court; the pattern of government control; and the legislative procedures. To empirically support the analysis, data from the United States, France and Germany from 1974 to 2009 is used. This case selection increases variance with regard to system types and court types. The main finding is that courts are not always absorbed as veto players: during the period of analysis, absorption varies between 11 and 71 per cent in the three systems. Furthermore, the pattern of absorption is specific in each country due to government control, court majority and legislative procedure. Therefore, it can be concluded that they are conditional veto players. The findings have at least two implications. First, constitutional courts and supreme courts with judicial review rights should be systematically included in veto player analysis of political systems and not left aside. Any concept ignoring such courts may lead to invalid results, and any concept that counts such courts merely as an institutional feature may lead to distorted results that over‐ or under‐estimate their impact. Second, the findings also have implications for the study of judicial politics. The main bulk of literature in this area is concerned with auto‐limitation, the so‐called ‘self‐restraint’ of the government to avoid defeat at the court. This auto‐limitation, however, should only occur if a court is not absorbed. However, vetoes observed when the court is absorbed might be explained by strategic behaviour among judges engaging in selective defection.

The preliminary reference procedure under which the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) responds to questions from national courts regarding the interpretation of EU law is a key mechanism in many accounts of the development of European integration and law. While the significance of the procedure has been broadly acknowledged, one aspect has been largely omitted: The opportunity for member state governments to submit their views (‘observations’) to the Court in ongoing cases. Previous research has shown that these observations matter for the Court's decisions, and thus that they are likely to have a significant impact on the course of European integration. Still, little is known about when and why member states decide to engage in the preliminary reference procedure by submitting observations. This article shows that there is significant variation, both between cases and between member states, in the number of observations filed. A theoretical argument is developed to explain this variation. Most importantly, a distinction is made between legal and political reasons for governments to get involved in the preliminary reference cases, and it is argued that both types of factors should be relevant. By matching empirical data from inter‐governmental negotiations on legislative acts in the Council of the EU with member states’ subsequent participation in the Court procedures, a research design is developed to test these arguments. It is found that the decision to submit observations can be tied both to concerns with the doctrinal development of EU law and to more immediate political preferences. The conclusion is that the legal (the CJEU) and political (the Council) arenas of the EU system are more interconnected than some of the previous literature would lead us to believe.

A long tradition in political science holds that political institutions are designed for the benefit of the politicians who create them. Prominent among explanations for the creation and maintenance of effective judiciaries is the political insurance theory, which predicts higher levels of judicial independence where there is robust political competition. In this article, I consider the implications of political insurance theory for one of the most consequential organizational decisions for courts, the provision of panels or subsets of judges for rendering decisions. Identifying the ability of panels to provide political insurance, I contend that higher levels of political competition motivate the creation of panel systems in national high courts. An empirical analysis using an original dataset on the organic statutes of 106 high courts reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the use of panel systems, while further analysis shows that this relationship is limited to democracies.