Jeffrey R. Lax

Department of Political Science

Columbia University

420 W 118th St. (MC 3320)
Department of Political Science
Columbia University
New York City, NY 10027
JRL2124 at columbia dot edu
(212) 854-4302

• How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in the States?, forthcoming, American Journal of Political Science, with Justin Phillips
  We compare two approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original dataset of over 100 surveys on gay rights issues as well as 1988 presidential election data. Under optimal conditions, both methods work well, but multilevel modeling performs better generally. Compared to baseline opinion measures, it yields smaller errors, higher correlations, and more reliable estimates. Multilevel modeling is clearly superior when samples are smaller---indeed, one can accurately estimate state opinion using only a single large national survey. This greatly expands the scope of issues for which researchers can study sub-national opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking.
  
  
• Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts, forthcoming, Journal of Politics, with Dimitri Landa
  Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multi-member) decision-making.  How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the structure and content of legal rules, as well as for the coherence, determinacy, and complexity of legal doctrine.  We provide conditions for the occurrence of these doctrinal attributes in the output of collegial courts. Finally, we consider the connection between the problems that arise in the collegial aggregation of a set of legal rules and those previously noted in the collegial application of a single, fixed legal rule.
  
  
• Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics, Vol. 5(3): September 2008, The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, with John Kastellec
  
  One complication in studying the Supreme Court and the judicial hierarchy is that the Court's docket is now nearly completely discretionary. Although the justices' strategies in picking cases affect the observations we can make and the inferences we draw, this is rarely taken into account in studies of judicial politics.  In this paper, we study how case selection might affect our inferences within judicial politics, including those about decision making in the Supreme Court itself (such as whether law constrains the justices) and throughout the judicial hierarchy (such as whether lower courts comply with Supreme Court doctrine).  We use Fourth Amendment case data to show that the inferential problems raised by the Court's case selection range from moderate to severe. At stake are substantive conclusions within some of the most important and controversial debates in judicial politics.
  
  
• Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts, Vol 101(3): August 2007, American Political Science Review
  Courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multi-member, or "collegial," courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegial rule that captures majoritarian preferences, and that there will exist a median rule even if there is no single median judge. I show how collegial rules can differ from the rules of individual judges and how judicial institutions (such as appellate review and the power to write separate opinions) affect the stability and enforceability of legal rules. These results are discussed in light of fundamental debates between legal and political perspectives on judicial behavior.
  
  
• Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court, Vol. 23(2): Summer 2007, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, with Charles M. Cameron
  We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an "open rule" for the other justices.  We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship---its legal quality.  The effort-cost of producing a high quality opinion creates a wedge that the assignee can exploit to move an opinion from the median without provoking a winning counter-offer.  We use this bargaining model as the foundation for a formal analysis of opinion assignment.  Both the bargaining and opinion assignment models display rich and tractable comparative statics, allowing them to explain well-known empirical regularities as well as generate new propositions, within a unified and internally consistent framework.
  
  
• Courts, Congress, and Public Policy, Part I: The FDA, the Courts, and the Regulation of Tobacco, p. 163-198, Vol. 15(1): 2006, The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, with Mathew D. McCubbins
  We test the public policy impact of court decisions relative to Congress and the executive by examining the FDA's proposals to regulate tobacco products. To measure impact we utilize an event study methodology that measures how a court decision affects the returns of selected publicly traded firms. This approach allows us to sort out the decisiveness of court decisions that occur in the shadow of the executive and congressional power, as well as to sort out the power of judges within the judicial hierarchy. We find that courts, including District Courts, have the ability to affect significantly the expected profits of firms.
  
  
• Courts, Congress, and Public Policy, Part II: The Impact of the Reapportionment Revolution on Urban and Rural Interests, p. 199-218, Vol. 15(1): 2006, The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, with Mathew D. McCubbins
  Before the "Reapportionment Revolution," decades of precedent held that the legislative district boundaries were not justiciable, no matter how little the districts reflected population distributions. In Baker v. Carr, a majority of justices declared for the first time that courts could indeed address these disparities. This article evaluates the impact of these decisions on legislative politics and policymaking. We examine three indicators of change. In the first, we test the impact of two key reapportionment cases, Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders, on policies favoring rural and urban interests (using event study methodology). Our analysis shows that these decisions shifted the benefits of public policy toward urban interests and away from rural interests. The second effect of reapportionment that we study is the relationship of Southern Democrats to the rest of the Democratic Party in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate. In our third test, we examine the political changes wrought by a similar set of cases affecting the California legislature.
  
  
• Certiorari and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy: Discretion, Reputation, and the Rule of Four, Vol. 15(1): 2003, Journal of Theoretical Politics
  Corrections and Printing Errors
  I develop a formal model of the interaction between auditing by the Supreme Court (certiorari) and compliance by the lower courts.  The compliance literature generally treats the Court as a unitary actor, ignoring the "Rule of Four" (only four votes are needed to grant certiorari).  Furthermore, this rule is generally assumed to limit majoritarian dominance, which would be puzzling given that the rule itself is subject to majority control.  I show that the Rule of Four actually increases majority power by increasing lower court compliance and that it is Pareto superior to a "Rule of Five."  What is counter-majoritarian in appearance is majoritarian in effect.  I show separately that, while sincere behavior is often taken for granted at the Supreme Court level, potential non-compliance creates heretofore unrecognized incentives for the justices to conceal their true preferences, so as to induce greater compliance.
  
  
• Fair Division: A Format for the Debate on the Format of Debates, Vol. 32(1): March 1999, PS: Political Science and Politics
   

• Doctrinal Choice in the Judicial Hierarchy
  How does the structure of legal doctrine as chosen by a higher court affect the application of and compliance with that doctrine by lower courts? How does the Supreme Court's need to rely on the lower courts affect the choice among doctrinal structures? Specifically, how does it drive the choice between determinate doctrines (rules) and more flexible or indeterminate doctrines (standards)? I present a case-space model of both rules and standards, wherein I define a standard as incorporating a factual dimension that is only imperfectly observable or specifiable. I show that the choice between rules and standards will depend on the alignment of preferences between levels of the judicial hierarchy, the transparency of decision-making, the precision with which doctrine can be specified, the sensitivity of the desired doctrine to changing case facts, and issue salience and complexity.
  
  
• Tactical Opinion Assignment and Voting in the Supreme Court, with Kelly T. Rader
  Winner, Best Paper 2007, American Judicature Society Award
  The latest version of this project is the following paper:
  
  
• Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court, with Kelly T. Rader
  
  How can we figure out relative bargaining power within the Supreme Court? We argue that fluidity, the switching of votes by a justice between the initial internal conference vote and the final reported vote in a case, can reveal the likely location of the majority opinion---because all else equal justices should be less likely to switch the happier they are with the majority opinion. Different theories make various predictions for opinion location. We draw out the implications for how happy a particular choice of assignee should make each justice in the majority. This in turn should correlate to the probability of vote switching. We then compare the predictions of each model to observed vote switching. We make use of multilevel probit regression and roughly 40 years of Supreme Court vote data. Among the theories we consider, we find that the evidence from fluidity supports the conclusion that authorship does matter. In particular, the evidence is compatible with the bargaining and opinion assignment model in Lax and Cameron (2007), suggesting that power within the Court does lie partially in the hands of opinion authors and thus of the Chief Justices who pick them, as constrained by the need to maintain a majority coalition.
  
  
• Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness, with Justin Phillips
  We study the relationship between public opinion and the adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians. Using national surveys and advances in multilevel modeling, we estimate state-level support for policies such as civil unions and the inclusion of sexual orientation in non-discrimination and hate crimes laws. We show a high degree of responsiveness to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for the ideology of state voters and elected officials, and present evidence that this is a causal relationship. We also find a surprising amount of non-congruence with opinion: while for some policies opinion majorities clearly prevail, for others even clear super-majority support seems insufficient for policy adoption, with a clear divide between issues of personal and familial relationships and issues of economic fairness. When non-congruent, policy tends to be more conservative than desired by opinion majorities---that is, we find little pro-gay policy bias.
  
  
• Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?, with Kelly Rader
  The role of law in Supreme Court decision-making remains a central debate in judicial politics. One new line of attack, pioneered by Kritzer and Richards (2002), involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the relevancy and weight of various case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the Supreme Court justices themselves. The standard test assumes votes in cases within a given term are fully independent observations. However, we would expect the justices' votes to be clustered both by case and by term. We argue that a ``randomization test,'' an underused non-parametric test that does not make such assumptions, is more appropriate and show that the standard test for regime change does not work well. There is little evidence that precedents change the behavior of sitting justices. Regime effects are no larger than what we would expect from random variation.
  
  
• Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees, with Jonathan Kastellec and Justin Phillips
  We study the relationship between state-level public opinion and the roll call votes of senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that greater public support strongly increases the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

• Judicial Politics (Graduate)
• American Politics (Graduate), with Robert Erikson
• Judicial Politics (Undergraduate)
• Logic of Collective Choice (Undergraduate)