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What explains expansions to the federal judiciary? Whereas existing research focuses on unified government as an explanation, we argue ideological proximity between institutions involved in the expansion process more accurately predicts judicial expansions. We examine whether Congress chose to add seats to each federal district or circuit court annually from 1937 to 2012 and find expansions are more likely when (1) the ideological distance between chambers of Congress is smaller and (2) the ideological distance between Congress and individual district or circuit courts is greater. These findings suggest the administration of federal courts is influenced by the political concerns in another branch of government, raising important questions about judicial independence.

The European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights apply their respective regional treaties. But they also view the regional rights systems as embedded in a global human rights regime and interpret regional rights in light of broader international human rights norms. In doing so, they sometimes cite each other, importing and exporting human rights ideas and principles. Though the decisions of one court do not constitute formal precedent in another, we argue that cross-citations among them play a coordinating role. The regional human rights courts are thus constructing a nascent trans-regional human rights jurisprudence, an emerging frontier in international human rights.

Supreme Court oral arguments are the only publicly scheduled opportunities for the Justices and advocates to directly engage in discussions about a case. There are few rules to regulate these conversations. Within this unique setting and due to the lack of argument structure combined with the limited time allotted to each argument, the Justices vie for chances to speak, sometimes at the expense of utterances from other Justices. In this Article we examine how the Justices’ genders dictate much of the Justices’ interactions and ultimately the power structure of oral argument.This Article shows how gender is an embedded characteristic of the oral arguments and how the Justices’ appropriations and perceptions of gender roles create disparities in the balance of authority on the Court. The Article’s analysis shows a major gap between male Justices’ interruptions of female Justices and female Justices interruptions’ of male Justices during oral arguments. After discussing why this is problematic, the Article offers suggestions for how the Court can reduce these interruptions through institutional reforms. The Article’s analyses corroborate conversational and power dynamics previously elucidated by sociolinguists, but also extend those findings to the insular environment of the United States Supreme Court.

The legal profession and the legal academy stress the importance of clear writing as a substantial component of effective law practice. But does clear writing translate into effective lawyering? This study takes a novel approach by using lawyers’ writing to measure the quality of legal advocacy. It is the only study to do so at the trial court level, where most lawyers practice, and is the first to track the difference in the readability of opposing parties’ briefs in the same case. After earlier studies of appellate brief quality and success on appeal yielded conflicting results, our study provides a clear association between brief readability and favorable outcomes on summary judgment motions. The study focuses on summary judgment motions because they offer a clear dichotomous outcome: the motions are either granted or denied. After controlling for attorney experience, law firm size, and a lawyer’s status as a repeat player before the motion judge, we find a statistically significant correlation between brief readability and summary judgment decisions.

Many legal scholars, academics, and practitioners contend that the quality of merits briefs matters little in the United States Supreme Court. According to this logic by the time a case has reached the Supreme Court, the facts are already clear from the record and experts have meticulously prepared briefs particularly tailored to meet the Justices’ informational needs. This article sets forth a different thesis; specifically that merits brief quality matters even at the upper-echelon of the U.S. Courts. The results of this article show that merits brief quality affects both case outcomes and the amount of language Supreme Court’s opinions share with merits briefs even after controlling for Supreme Court litigation expertise. Due to the lack of existing empirical scholarship on the effects of brief quality, this article has two objectives. First, it develops a conceptualization of brief quality that can be reliably measured. Second, it tests whether the quality of briefs matters by looking both at how this affects case outcomes and the Justices and clerks’ likelihood of adopting language from merits briefs in the Court’s opinions. To do this, the article develops a new measure to gauge brief quality and to make comparisons between briefs. The dataset created for this article consists of 9,498 Supreme Court merits briefs from the 1946 through the 2013 terms.

Supreme Court merits briefs are often the Justices’ and clerks’ primary resources for constructing opinions and they are designed for this purpose. The language, citations, arguments, and discussion contained within the briefs are oriented to provide the Court with a complete picture of each case. But how does the Court utilize this resource? The Court only occasionally cites briefs in its opinions, yet the effects of briefs far supersede this minimal but obvious relationship outcome. Another way to view the effect of briefs is through the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s language. Merits briefs provide the Court with access to case specific information and templates on which it can base opinions. This article examines the extent that the Court uses merits brief language in its opinions. Using linguistic analysis software, this article compares nearly 9,500 merits briefs between 1946 and 2013 with their respective opinions to examine the language that each opinion shares with merits briefs filed in the case. The article then locates the factors that lead the Court to incorporate varying amounts of language from the briefs in its majority opinions. The main findings are that the factors are relatively stable across time and that the most meaningful components are the receptivity or ideology of the justice, the influence of the brief-writer, and attributes specific to each case.