The “leaky pipeline” generally refers to the fact while women are completing their degrees and getting tenure-track jobs, academia fails to retain them. While previous studies have identified issues with salary inequalities, publishing disparities, biased student evaluations, and other factors that contribute to this failure to retain female scholars, this paper addresses the issue of service—particularly invisible labor and uncredited and uncompensated labor. As such, I make a simple argument: all labor should be credited and/or compensated. The fact that these types of labor are disproportionately undertaken by women—especially women of color—means that they are less likely to be promoted and less likely to be satisfied in academia. I discuss the value and necessity of invisible labor and offer specific suggestions for how to better provide credit for this work and incorporate it into official evaluations. I further address that advocacy for women requires individual and institutional reform that is active. Men need to be invested in promoting and supporting women, even when it offers no social prestige or reward and when it is hard or inconvenient. It is active work that requires self-education, self-awareness, self-improvement, and the dedication to change institutions so as to make academia more equitable for women, especially women of color.

The struggles Indigenous Peoples face are unique from other minority groups living in the United States because they exist in an odd semi-sovereign status. While the U.S. Constitution outlines that First Nations are sovereign entities, current federal law and policies hold that tribes are simultaneously sovereign and not sovereign. Using an original dataset consisting of all cases involving Indigenous Peoples before state supreme courts from 1995 – 2010, we find Indigenous Peoples are more likely to receive positive judicial outcomes when 1) the judiciary is elected, and 2) the indigenous population of the state is relatively high.

The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has stronger norms of consensus and preferences for unanimous decisions than its American counterpart. Given this powerful preference for collegial and unanimous decisions, what causes it to break down? Previous literature has left this question largely unexamined, and no empirical research examines how gender affects decisions to dissent on the Supreme Court of Canada. This paper thus fills this lacuna by analyzing the role of gender in dissenting behavior on the Supreme Court of Canada from 1984 to 2015. We analyze dissenting behavior in criminal and civil liberties cases, as well as sexual assault and equality cases, which may drive previously identified gender voting differences. We find that women dissent more frequently than their male peers, especially when their policy preferences diverge. Furthermore, we examine three competing theories of social dynamic panel effects to determine how the increased presence of women impact women’s decision to dissent. We find evidence of some self-silencing by women, where women become emboldened to dissent more as more women join the panel. Gender diversification explains dissenting behavior at the Canadian Supreme Court more accurately and across a broader array of case categories than institutional or case- specific legal factors.

If we want to address political science’s deficiencies regarding diversity, each subfield must examine the intersectionality of its membership. Currently, the APSA dashboard supplies data in aggregate only, which glosses over intersectional groups such as women as color. To remedy this, we administered a survey to the Law and Courts membership to identify the basic demographics of the section. We encourage all subfields to undertake similar steps, as it allows each section to target efforts of recruitment and retention to their most under-represented members, specifically women of color, as these and other intersectional groups experience compounded inequalities and disenfranchisement within academia. We know that faculty of color are less likely to achieve tenure, experience salary disparities, have less job satisfaction, and experience hostile climates in research and teaching. One of the largest hurdles to recruiting individuals with intersectional identities is the current deficit. In short, without such acknowledgement, evaluation, discussion, and deliberate reform, the damning response to why there is no diversity in academia will be truly because we do not want it.

Does groupthink affect court deference to the government in times of heightened security concerns? We argue that male judges serving in homogeneous panels in federal appellate courts modified their behavior post-9/11, but that the presence of a female on the panel mitigated these effects. Using data on the U.S. Court of Appeals from 1978 to 2008 in search-and-seizure cases, we argue that women can safeguard against groupthink effects that otherwise trend toward a more deferential, less rights-oriented approach in times of heightened security. Our findings suggest women mitigate their male colleagues’ shift toward more deferential decisions by affecting panel outcomes that are more consistent with peacetime decisions. These results suggest the important role women exert in collegial panels beyond direct voting patterns. In times of heightened security concerns, panel diversity can avoid groupthink that might stand in the judiciary’s way of providing an effective check on executive and legislative power.

Recent research reveals judicial tendencies to decide cases more conservatively during times of war. Building on studies in political psychology, we use the observed movement in favor of increased security versus lib- erty in times of war on the courts to investigate differences in how liberals and conservatives are motivated by threat concerns. We find that war mainly conditions decision making by liberal judges in criminal and civil liberties cases. The results furthermore suggest that ideological differences play little role in wartime decision making for civil liberties cases.

Scholars who examine judicial independence offer various theories regarding its development. Some argue that it serves as a type of insurance for regimes who believe their majority status is in jeopardy. Other scholars argue that insurance theory does not offer an adequate explanation until states democratize. We argue that part of the explanation for these mixed results involves the inadequacy of insurance theory as a complete explanation. Our paper develops a multidimensional theory that focuses on the interplay of constraints on ruling elites derived from levels of political competition within the government, the potential for social competition within the state, and regime type. We test our argument using a dataset of approximately 145 countries over forty years, and our results support the argument that development of judicial independence is related to the political landscape encountered by the executive. Ethnic fractionalization in the state, political competition, and regime type each has a conditional effect on the observation of judicial independence.

Traditional separation of powers models assert that the Supreme Court takes into consideration the policy preferences of other institutions and behaves strategically so as to place legal policy at its preferred policy point. The vagueness doctrine, however, asserts that the Court determines statute constitutionality not from strategically calculating institutional ideological preferences but from the degree of specificity of the statute’s language itself. This study finds that the vagueness doctrine better predicts Court declarations of unconstitutionality than preference-based models, suggesting that the language of the law itself is crucial to statutory decisions.

A large sample of cases from the courts of appeal in five large Canadian provinces are examined to assess the impact of gender diversification on appellate courts. The findings are that there are significant gender differences on the courts of appeal that parallel those on the Supreme Court of Canada. Women are significantly more likely than men are to support the government in criminal cases and to support the individual in civil liberties cases. Moreover, strong panel effects are discovered. As the number of female judges increases, the more male judges tend to adopt the typical female approach to judicial outcomes; no evidence is found that supports critical mass theory.

Courts are often heralded as bastions for rights protections. Protecting rights enables courts to generate legitimacy as an institution but can also legitimize the governmental regime within which it is situated. Yet this creates a dilemma for colonial states regarding Indigenous Peoples. Because of settler colonialism, Indigenous Peoples are left with few institutional mechanisms to secure their political interests and thus must often rely on courts to protect their rights. Yet, courts are placed in the difficult situation where they are asked to recognize and uphold indigenous rights of sovereignty, self-determination, and autonomy—which directly conflict with state claims of rightful, legitimate authority over occupied territories and which require the state to relinquish its authority over land, resources, and peoples. To analyze these tensions, this chapter examines how the Supreme Court of Mexico adjudicates cases pertaining to Indigenous Peoples from 2002-2019. This chapter fills significant gaps in existing scholarship, where little empirical research examines judicial decision-making in Mexico and where virtually no judicial scholarship examines indigenous rights.

Ecofeminism offers a feminist perspective that links gender to how humans relate to the natural world. As such, this framework explores the connections between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women, such as widespread views that both women and nature are property, are to be dominated, and are most valuable when cultivated and curated by men. We apply this philosophical and sociological framework to judicial decision-making, where women judges should view environmental issues as women’s issues and thus be more likely to favor environmental protections relative to her male peers. We evaluate this theory using environmental cases before the United States Supreme Court. Previous studies on gender and judicial decision- making examine how cases pertaining to women’s issues can alter a woman judge’s voting behavior; however, these studies have limited empirical analyses to cases that typically are associated with women’s issues (e.g. reproductive rights, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.). We thus expand this definition of women’s issues and examine the power dynamics between women (oppression) and the environment (extraction) by linguistically analyzing dissenting opinions to evaluate whether women authors differ in their language, attitudes, and framework pertaining to environmental issues compared to their male judge peers.

This chapter addresses the question of legal institutionalization (i.e., the process of incorporating legal norms into domestic laws and institutions) by analyzing data across ten common-law countries to determine whether domestic high courts follow these newly acquired socialized human right norms. Among the domestic institutions potentially able to incorporate new international norms, the judiciary is most able to legitimize these norms and mandate changes to domestic law as a result. Hence we ask: Does increased IGO participation lead to high courts increasingly favoring rights claimants in subsequent time periods?

Courts rarely play a role in scholarship pertaining to the diffusion, or spread, of human rights and the advancement of international law. This absence ignores the increasing reality that domestic courts can take the lead in promoting human rights. Through changes in international and domestic politics, judicialization, and conventionality control, courts have grown in power and are starting to exert their influence in adopting international human rights laws unilaterally. This chapter argues that courts matter in promoting human rights domestically and in internalizing and institutionalizing international law by translating and implementing international law as domestic, legally enforceable law. As such, this chapter fills the lacuna regarding the role of courts in the expansion and institutionalization of international human rights laws within nation-states.

In this chapter, we examine how the U.S. Supreme Court enabled the devolution of federal obligations to First Nations, which then catalyzed increasing federal delegation of indigenous affairs to states to generate conflicts between state governments and Indigenous Peoples—thereby forcing the sovereignty of First Nations to be in constant flux and requiring frequent litigation in courts. We find that this devolution directly undermines indigenous sovereignty and pushes indigenous rights to state courts, which tend to view Indigenous Peoples as interest groups and associations rather than sovereign nations. This combination ensures that that indigenous rights are rarely secured. We then compare these trends to two other common law, federalist democracies with British colonial history: Australia and Canada. These common law systems illustrate how changing political environments across federalist institutions impact the role of courts and indigenous access to justice. Indeed, changes in federal policy and federalist delegation of indigenous affairs vary dramatically across these three nations. While they share similar colonial histories and approaches to indigenous affairs, the delegation of indigenous policy has moved in three different directions. In the United States, indigenous policy authority shifted from the federal government to the states. In Australia, the opposite trend emerges where states had initial authority over indigenous affairs, which increasingly shifted to the (federal) Commonwealth. Finally, indigenous affairs in Canada have largely stayed within the authority of the federal government since colonization. Hence, these three cases aid our evaluation of how shifts of indigenous policy across federalist institutions affect court roles and indigenous rights protections.

This chapter reevaluates the effectiveness of the IACHR by examining state compliance to its decisions. More specifically, this chapter addresses compliance to IACHR reparation orders demanding domestic legal reform. I find that compliance to these costly reparations is substantially higher than previous assumed. This compliance suggests that the IACHR does, in fact, exert significant legal influence on state behavior and domestic legal systems in a way that reinforces the rule of law and international human rights protections.

This chapter focuses on the role of the chief justice in statutory interpretation. Using a unique dataset measuring the degree of discretion afforded by legislative statutes, we empirically examine how Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist approached statutory interpretation during their terms. More specifically, we analyze how these chiefs personally respond to fluctuations in statutory detail and then examine how they influence the remaining justices. Additionally, we provide a qualitative assessment of Chief Justice Roberts to determine the extent to which he approaches statutory interpretation similarly to his predecessors in his initial terms.