Case salience affects nearly every aspect of Supreme Court justices' behavior, yet a valid actor-based measure of salience has remained elusive. Researchers have instead relied on external proxy indicators, such as amicus curiae participation and media coverage, to explain justices' behavior. We propose a novel measurement of salience in which we use justices' differential levels of engagement to generate actor-based measures of case and justice-level salience. Focusing on justices' behavior during oral argument, we contend that the more engaged the justices are in a case-defined by the number of words they speak-the more salient the case.

Supreme Court oral arguments are often characterized as the Court rapidly firing questions at attorneys who struggle to keep up; however, nearly half of the Court’s utterances come not as questions but as statements. I ask whether patterns of questioning and commenting behavior during oral arguments can predict case outcomes and justice votes. To answer this question, I develop a theory of strategic communication that accounts for the differential ways justices—and other strategic actors—use queries and comments during arguments. Using transcripts from 1981 to 2019, I code for use of questions and statements, finding the two theoretically and empirically distinct: where questions increase a party’s chances of winning, statements increase their chance of losing.

No abstract

No abstract