The Institutional Foundations of Judicial Independence

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The state courts of last resort are significant final decisionmakers in many areas states govern, including family, many business disputes, and criminal law. Second, it has long been a matter of common scholarly wisdom that courts do not tend to go against dominant political coalitions or major public policy initiatives of executives who are in power. We have little understanding of the mechanisms, and whether judicial selection methods matter or whether public opinion seems to influence decisions. We also have little systematic evidence over time about what these state courts of last resort do, or how decisions are influenced by public opinion or methods of judicial selection. While some databases have been assembled, they have been coded by hand. Advances in machine learning allow coding of cases for subject matter and date of a much larger number of cases than we currently have available. The database of cases this project will generate will be useful to many scholars.The development of web-scraping software tools for state court of last resort decisions is a significant innovation in the field, allowing coding of a much broader range of cases than have currently been available to scholars. The plan to check machine coding with human coders will allow assessment of these new tools. This project will allow assessing change over time in courts and influences on judicial decisions in a way that relies on the most current methodologies regarding measuring public opinion and judicial decisions.