Selecting Chief Justices by Peer Vote

Abstract

What characteristics do state supreme court justices prioritize when choosing leaders? At the federal level, collegial court leaders are appointed or rotated by seniority. A plurality of states permit peer-vote selection, but the consequences of employing this mechanism are not well known. We develop a theory of chief justice selection emphasizing experience, bias, and politics. Leveraging within-contest variation and more than a half century’s worth of original contest data, we find that chief justice peer votes often default to seniority rotation. Ideological divergence from the court median, governor, and legislature is largely unassociated with selection. Justices who dissent more than their peers are, however, disadvantaged. We find no evidence of discrimination against women or people of color. The results have implications for policy debates about political leader selection.

Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology

“…Langer et al (2003) found that ideologically extreme judges are less likely to be elected as chief justice by their peers. More recent scholarship by Fife, Goelzhauser, and Loertscher (2021) concludes that ideological tendencies are less influential than the rate at which a justice dissents from the court's decisions.…”

“…The current supreme court justices also ought to be informed and sophisticated when picking a chief justice (Fife, Goelzhauser, and Loertscher 2021;Langer et al 2003). They have already worked alongside the relevant candidates in a small group setting and likely formed opinions about their strengths and weaknesses.…”