Abstract:
Legislative proposals that attack or curb state supreme courts are often introduced in state legislatures. However, the causes of state court curbing legislation have not been systematically analyzed. This article seeks to expand on existing knowledge of court curbing by examining what causes some U.S. state legislators to introduce court curbing bills. I develop a theoretical argument that court curbing is driven by court–legislator ideological distance and legislator electoral security. I demonstrate that legislators who are ideologically distant from their state supreme court and electorally secure introduce the most court curbing legislation.
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Notes
3 When calculating the median justice, some ideological scores were rarely missing. In the case of missing data in states where there is gubernatorial appointment, I used the appointing governor’s ideology score when calculating the median justice. In states where judges are elected, I also used the governor’s scores if the missing justice was previously appointed to a lower court or temporarily to the supreme court by the governor. For missing justices in South Carolina, I used the ideology score of the median legislator of the entire legislative body in the most recent year the missing justice was legislatively elected.
4 The core findings of this article of an interactive relationship between the variables Safe Seat and Ideological Distance and that court curbing bill cosponsorship is driven by high legislative professionalism do not substantively change if the vote share threshold for electoral safety changes. Coding the legislator’s vote share as a continuous variable also does not substantively alter these relationships.
5 Of the five judicial method of retention variables Life Tenure was the base category used for the analysis. Changing the base category does not alter the results presented here.
