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In 2006 an historic era of the Supreme Court came to a close with the retirement of its first female justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. This paper attempts to expand judicial behavior scholarship by examining O'Connor's policy preferences for possible ideological change during her twenty-five year tenure on the Court. Average liberalism scores for her overall and civil rights/civil liberties issue area votes show an increase in liberalism over time. The researcher employs time series cross section analysis with panel corrected standard errors to determine factors responsible for this increase. Issue change, interagreement with the other justices, changes in Court membership, ideological mood of the country, and political polarization account for the lion's share of the increase. Contrary to the prevailing attitudinal model, change of preference does occur; however, the issue of separating true preference change from other salient influences in a statistical model remains unresolved.

This paper is a study on the effect of caste on bench assignments on the Indian Supreme Court. The objective was to determine whether the Chief Justices have historically assigned associate justices to benches based on their individual castes – Brahmin or Non-Brahmin – in order to tilt the bias of the Court in either an elitist (Brahmin) direction or a non-elitist (Non-Brahmin) direction. Based on a probability analysis of panel assignments, I created a new model to determine the extant of castebased judicial selection bias on the Indian Supreme Court. Using a random sample of cases from 1950 to 2000, a two-sample test of proportionality was employed to test whether any bias was present in the Chief Justice’s bench assignments. No caste bias was discovered in either the fifty-year period of the Court or in a smaller data set of cases between 1977 and 2000 (a period after the emergency between 1975 and 1977).

How do individual qualities of interest groups and group interactions influence public policy through the courts? This research is grounded in two primary assumptions: 1) neither are all amicus briefs (formal tool to lobby the court) equal, nor do amicus-filing organizations have the same attributes, and 2) the behavior of Supreme Court justices is shaped by the qualities of actors external to the court. Through advanced statistical techniques, and the tools of network analysis, I build on previous scholarship to provide a large-scale study of how the qualities of amicus brief cosigners, and their interaction within their advocacy network over time, bear on judicial politics. Making use of the total population of amicus-filling organizations to U.S. Supreme Court cases between 1945 and 2012, chapter 1 uses a dynamic network analysis to investigate the evolution of organizational identity and coalition behavior of interest groups based on the issue area they advocate for. Chapter 2 investigates the impact of the ideological composition of interest groups supporting the litigants on the justices’ vote. Chapter 3 analyzes how decision at the agenda-setting stage interacts with outside lobbying to influence the opinion-writing process on merit. The results provide a more comprehensive picture a more comprehensive picture of judicial lobbying; a crucial piece in the operation of the American democracy.

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A tese apresenta modelo de classificação de ações judiciais categorias e de ressignificação escalas da decisão judicial em categoria dicotômica (Liberal e Garantista), calcada em modelo teórico de definição da direção do resultado judicial institucional (decisão) e individual (voto) . Testa o modelo em face de decisões do STF no período de 1988 e 1989, em sede de controle de constitucionalidade (ADI). Apresenta as inferências extraíveis dos dados quantitativos, sob 03 perspectivas fidelidade, álibi e traição. / This research presents model and methodology for classifying judicial cases, according to categories, and its opinions, through scales, in two behavioral patterns (Liberal and Garantista), which summarize the decision and vote directions. The model is tested against a specific set of STFs judicial opinions from 1988 and 1989 (direct judicial review). Possible inferences are extracted from the quantitative results produced, using a threefold perspective, labeled as faithfulness, alibi and treason. Concludes that the model can be used by different analytic models, such as Legal, Attitudinal and Formal Theory.

Since the mid-1980s, U.S. and foreign parties have filed more than 100,000 lawsuits in U.S. federal courts asking for adjudication of disputes arising from transnational activity. These lawsuits raise a fundamental question of global governance: Who governs? Should the United States assert its authority to adjudicate a transnational dispute, or should it defer to the adjudicative authority of a foreign state that also has connections with the underlying activity? Should the United States assert its authority to prescribe the rules governing that activity, or should it defer to foreign prescriptive authority? U.S. district courts routinely face these questions in transnational litigation, and by answering them they help allocate governance authority among states. To shed light on the role of domestic courts in global governance, this dissertation asks: How often and under what circumstances do U.S. district courts defer to foreign authority to govern transnational activity rather than asserting domestic authority? Drawing on private international law scholarship and theories of international relations, judicial behavior, and bounded rationality, I develop a series of hypotheses about the legal and political factors that influence judicial allocation of governance authority. I then statistically test these hypotheses using original data on U.S. district court decisionmaking in two transnational litigation settings: the allocation of adjudicative authority under the forum non conveniens doctrine, and the allocation of prescriptive authority under various choice-of-law methods. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that U.S. judges are reluctant to defer to foreign authority, I find that they defer at a rate of approximately 50% in both settings. And notwithstanding claims that legal doctrine does not significantly affect judicial decisionmaking, I present evidence suggesting that the forum non conveniens doctrine and choice-of-law doctrine both influence judicial allocation of governance authority. There is evidence of both direct doctrinal effects, as contemplated by legalist theory, and indirect doctrinal effects, resulting from the use of judicial heuristics which allow judges to conserve scarce decisionmaking resources while making decisions that achieve acceptable levels of legal quality. Significant political factors include whether the foreign state is a liberal democracy, the domestic political environment, and U.S. parties' preferences. / Dissertation

A tese apresenta modelo de classificação de ações judiciais categorias e de ressignificação escalas da decisão judicial em categoria dicotômica (Liberal e Garantista), calcada em modelo teórico de definição da direção do resultado judicial institucional (decisão) e individual (voto) . Testa o modelo em face de decisões do STF no período de 1988 e 1989, em sede de controle de constitucionalidade (ADI). Apresenta as inferências extraíveis dos dados quantitativos, sob 03 perspectivas fidelidade, álibi e traição. / This research presents model and methodology for classifying judicial cases, according to categories, and its opinions, through scales, in two behavioral patterns (Liberal and Garantista), which summarize the decision and vote directions. The model is tested against a specific set of STFs judicial opinions from 1988 and 1989 (direct judicial review). Possible inferences are extracted from the quantitative results produced, using a threefold perspective, labeled as faithfulness, alibi and treason. Concludes that the model can be used by different analytic models, such as Legal, Attitudinal and Formal Theory.

O Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) é uma das instituições mais importantes do país, e tem recebido cada vez mais atenção da sociedade brasileira. Ano a ano, a corte é acionada para julgar dezenas de milhares de casos, muitos deles com impacto direto na vida econômica, política e social do país. Investigar quais são os fatores que influenciam o comportamento dos ministros do STF é fundamental para compreendermos o processo de tomada de decisões do Tribunal. Apesar de existirem estudos importantes sobre o resultado das ações de controle de constitucionalidade, ainda existe espaço para estudar o comportamento individual dos ministros. O objetivo do presente trabalho é analisar o comportamento individual dos ministros do STF, utilizando-se as votações dos ministros frente às ações de controle de constitucionalidade que foram decididas de forma colegiada. A proposta de trabalho é verificar como os ministros se agrupam e quais fatores influenciam sua divisão. Para isso, propomos a utilização do método de estimação de pontos ideias. Nossa hipótese primária de trabalho é que existe uma influência da indicação presidencial no comportamento dos ministros do Supremo Tribunal Federal. Dessa forma, haveria uma divisão da Corte entre os ministros nomeados por diferentes partidos. A hipótese secundária seria que as trajetórias profissionais dos ministros também influenciam em sua forma de decidir, sendo possível, portanto, identificar divisões entre os ministros a partir desta variável. Os resultados do presente trabalho indicam que variáveis associadas aos modelos atitudinais do comportamento judicial, partidos dos presidentes que indicaram os ministros, ideologia e filosofia judicial dos ministros, são variáveis mais relevantes para explicar as agrupamentos e dissensos no STF do que as que dizem respeito as trajetórias profissionais dos juízes. / The Supremo Tribunal Federal - STF (Federal Supreme Court) is one of the most relevant institutions in Brazil, and it has increasingly gained attention from Brazilian society. Year after year, the Court is demanded to rule thousands of cases, a lot of them with direct impact in the countrys economic political and social life. To investigate which factors influence the Justices behavior is paramount to understand the decision-making process of the Court. The goal of this work is to analyze the Justices individual behavior, by looking at the Justices individual vote in Constitutional Review cases that were decided in collegiate manner. This dissertation verifies how the Justices cluster themselves and which factors influence their division. For that, we employ the ideal point estimation method. Our primary hypothesis states that the presidential nomination exerts influence in the Justices behavior. In this way, it would be possible to identify a division in the Court among Justices nominated by different parties. Our secondary hypothesis states that the Justices professional background also exerts influence in how they decide, therefore making possible to identify divisions among Justices by taking this variable as a dividing line. The results of the present work indicate that the variables associated with the attitudinal models of judicial behavior, presidential party responsible for Justice nomination, ideology and Justices judicial philosophy are more relevant variables to explain the clusters and dissensus in STF than variables linked to magistrates professional background.