Supreme Court vacancies are now characterized by great partisan efforts to confirm—or impede—the nomination. Amid a politicized vacancy before the 2020 election, there was cause to question the conclusion that these vacancies do not harm the judiciary in the public’s eyes. We utilize panel data collected before and after Justice Ginsburg’s death to investigate the effects of the vacancy and partisan posturing to fill it. We find that the battle over the vacancy yielded decreases in diffuse support among Democrats, particularly among those who read a story about Senate Republicans’ willingness to fill an election-year vacancy after refusing to in 2016. Support for federal judicial elections decreased across survey waves, but only among certain subsets of respondents. Finally, belief that one’s preferred 2020 candidate would nominate the next justice significantly influenced support for curbing. Elected branch politics appear capable of influencing the mass public’s level of support for the Court.

US Supreme Court confirmation hearings provide senators with an opportunity to engage a potential justice on a nationwide stage. Senators probe for information about future behavior on the bench. Nominees work through the questions, oscillating between forthcoming and vague responses. Such behavior encourages popular narratives that characterize this intricate dance as a “vapid and hollow charade.” We challenge this wisdom and argue that senators use these hearings to provide meaningful representation to their constituents while simultaneously supporting copartisan efforts regarding the nominee. We examine the exchanges in 185 senator-nominee pairings that span nearly 30 years of confirmation hearings. Our results show that senators from both parties increase their question-asking activity during divided government, when confirmation success is more dubious. Senators from the president’s party ask fewer questions when their constituents support the nominee, however, suggesting that popular support can attenuate this general effect for senators expecting a successful confirmation.

Since the end of the 1980s the Supreme Court has cut its caseload nearly in half. While this decrease has not gone unnoticed, researchers have largely focused their explanations on institutional factors, such as changes in personnel, creation of the certiorari pool, or an increase in the amount of discretion justices have to set their agenda. Most existing work fails to consider how the preferences of members of Congress and the president also contribute to this staggering decrease. I provide the first systematic examination of how extrainstitutional influences affect the size of the Court’s caseload. I examine the 1951–2016 terms of the Court to reveal that a constraining political environment significantly reduces the number of cases the justices agree to hear each term. These results suggest that the justices consider the preferences of actors in the other branches of government much earlier than their decisions on the merits.

The Supreme Court’s docket consists of thousands of cases each term, with petitioners hoping at least four justices will be compelled to grant review to their case. The decision to move a case from their docket to their calendar for oral arguments and all intermediate steps is what is known as the agenda-setting process. This is a fundamental step in the judicial process, as the Supreme Court cannot establish precedent and affect policy change without first deciding to review.

The Supreme Court decided on June 24, 2022 in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (597 US (2022)) to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, a seismic shift in abortion policy that makes states key battlegrounds in fights over abortion and broader reproductive rights. In this paper, we focus on the role of state supreme courts in setting state abortion policies. Using an original data set of state court decisions surrounding abortion from the past 20 years, we investigate how two overarching factors affect state supreme court decision-making on abortion. First, we track how the political environment of states affects the decisions courts make about access to abortion. Second, we consider the scope of the abortion policy considered by the courts. We find that the partisan makeup of state legislatures does not influence the direction of state supreme courts’ rulings on abortion issues, but it does affect the scope of abortion regulation being considered by the courts. Additionally, we find that elected judges tend to be more responsive to constituent preferences when ruling on abortion policies. Overall, our findings suggest the multifaceted dynamics in state supreme courts’ rulings on abortion.