Courting Legal Change: Dynamics of Voting on the U.s. Supreme Court

Abstract : The literature on the Supreme Court has used static models of voting to estimate the policy preferences of justices that largely ignore the role of precedent, a dynamic component in justices' decision-making process that could help explain part of their voting behavior. I formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic game-theoretic model of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that can infer the preferences of individual justices over ideology versus the weight they place on respecting precedent. I find that justices who experience a high cost of deviating from precedent are more ideological when their votes are likely to be pivotal. Taking the model to data, I find that precedent plays a sizable role in explaining justices' voting behaviors with significant heterogeneity across justices and legal issues. Moreover, incorporating precedent in the analysis changes the ideology estimates for about one-third of the justices in the sample. I use these estimates to simulate counterfactual outcomes for policy proposals, such as court-packing and judicial term limits.

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The Costs of Top-down Control: Discretion and Departures Among Federal Prosecutors

Abstract : We study a policy during the Bush Administration intended to better control the day-to-day decisions of federal prosecutors, reducing their discretion and increasing the severity of sentencing. We present three main findings. First, using detailed biographical data on US Attorneys appointed by President Bush, we show that Senators' veto power influences how politicized (though not how qualified) the appointed US Attorney is. This shows that inter-branch and inter-party checks can keep expert bureaucracies apolitical. Second, using detailed administrative data from the Department of Justice's internal case monitoring database, we show that only the offices with politicized US Attorneys actually implemented the policy. This shows that managers' commitment is essential for enacting organization-wide reforms. Finally, we show these same offices saw a significant increase in the departure rate of front-line prosecutors following implementation. This shows that exercising political control over bureaucratic decisions entails a large personnel cost.

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Crime and Punishment: Do Politicians in Power Receive Special Treatment in Courts? Evidence from India

Abstract : Are elected politicians treated more leniently when facing criminal charges? I present evidence of judicial discretion in the world's largest democracy, India. I analyze whether pending criminal cases of politicians marginally winning the election are more likely to be closed without a conviction compared to cases from politicians marginally losing the election. I find that winning office increases the chances of a favorable outcome only for politicians from the ruling party. Evidence suggests that the misuse of executive powers and witnesses turning hostile are among the main explanations for this result.

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