One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the presence of a whistleblower can increase compliance by lower courts, beyond a certain point blowing the whistle is counterproductive and actually reduces compliance. Moreover, a whistleblower who is a "perfect ally" of the higher court (in terms of preferences) blows the whistle too often. Our model shows an important connection between the frequency of whistleblowing and the effectiveness of whistleblowing as a threat to induce compliance in hierarchical organizations.

One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the presence of a whistleblower can increase compliance by lower courts, beyond a certain point blowing the whistle is counterproductive and actually reduces compliance. Moreover, a whistleblower who is a "perfect ally" of the higher court (in terms of preferences) blows the whistle too often. Our model shows an important connection between the frequency of whistleblowing and the effectiveness of whistleblowing as a threat to induce compliance in hierarchical organizations.

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In this paper, I develop and empirically test a theory of judicial learning. In the model, the Supreme Court uses the Courts of Appeals as laboratories of law, learning from their decisions to determine how best to advance doctrine. The model shows how the Supreme Court leverages multiple Courts of Appeals decisions to identify which cases will be most informative to review, and what decision to make upon review. Because an unbiased judge only makes an extremist decision when there is an imbalance in the parties' arguments, the Supreme Court is able to draw inferences from cases it chooses not to review. Applying two of the model's new empirical predictions to data, I show the Supreme Court is more likely to review moderate than extremist decisions, and also show that when the Supreme Court is resolving conflicts between lower courts it is more likely to strike down doctrines it reviews. Together, the results depict the judicial hierarchy as an institution focused on doctrinal development, rather than doctrinal discipline.

In this appendix, we:• explain our case selection procedures;• describe our weighting and variable creation procedures;• present a robustness check using an alternative measure of the whistleblower. Case SelectionOur dataset comprises two distinct sources of cases that differ according to whether a particular three-judge panel decision was reviewed en banc or not. To increase statistical power, we then augmented this dataset with all cases that were re-heard en banc that we had not already collected. the universe of en banc reviews of threejudge panel decisions made between 1986 and 2002, subject to the constraint that some cases were not included due to missing data or because the ideological direction of the disposition could not be ascertained. We started with the en bancs analyzed in Clark (2009), which 1