The sentencing decisions of trial judges are constrained by statutory limits imposed by legislatures. At the same time, judges in many states face periodic review, often by the electorate. We develop a model in which the effects of these features of a judge’s political landscape on judicial behavior interact. The model yields several intriguing results: First, if legislators care about the prop...

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be t...

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED). Over the past decade, clinicians and bioethicists have increasingly recognized VSED as a medically and ethically appropriate means to hasten death. Most recently, in September 2013, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) called on its 2,000 memb...

Ferejohn and Shipan introduce a game theoretic model of sequential statutory policymaking, in which an administrative agency implements a regulatory policy and three actors court, legislature, and executive are then allowed to sequentially respond by not acting or overturning the agency decision in favor of an alternative policy. The authors find that the agency has substantial policymaking dis...

Because agency enforcement of the Medicaid statute against non-compliant states is utterly impractical, Medicaid providers and beneficiaries have relied on section 1983 litigation to protect themselves against the harmful effects of state cutbacks on Medicaid spending by privately enforcing two particular provisions of the Medicaid statute against the states. However, because of several legisla...

INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................893 I. AVENUES FOR ESTABLISHING A CIVIL GIDEON ................................898 A. Judicial Strategies ............................................................. 898 1. Federal Due Process Claims ...................................899 2. Federal Equal Protection Claims .........................

The existence of both the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals makes it possible to test several important hypotheses of elections held between 1988 and 2008 using a variety of statistical tools related to the impact that subject matter jurisdiction (civil versus criminal) has on the outcomes of an election. In this comparative analysis, this article shows that the factors th...