Open research questions in Judicial and Constitutional Studies
80 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 5,758 Judicial and Constitutional Studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
251 Moreover, the consequences of TANF’s failings are not limited to the welfare context but have feedback effects for would-be claimants affecting political and civic engagement more broadly.
Welfare in the Courts: The Impact of Racial Retrenchment on Indigent Peoples’ Procedural Rights in Cash Assistance Programming · 2026 · DOI87 In the international legal context, in particular, only a few studies have looked at the impact of women judges on outcomes. 89 My own research on damages has also found conflicting results. Even then, the results are inconclusive and outcomes in individual cases are difficult to predict.
Focusing on the moderating effect of elite behavior and contextual factors, we demonstrate that supporters of incumbent governments are more tolerant of government non‐compliance in the years following high-profile shows of interbranch attacks or government disregard of high court decisions, and in environments where the media is lacking independence.
Given limited data availability for other ideological measures pre-1990 and post-2010, we conclude that these updated PAJID scores should prove attractive to scholars studying state courts during these periods and among those who desire additional state supreme court ideological data for robustness checks.
That new focus on the distribution of power leads to a second major implication of the case: The decisions of hundreds of inferior officers, such as administrative patent judges, must be subject to the review of a principal officer, but many questions remain to be answered about the exact scope and content of that review.
Is support for the US Supreme Court stable over time? Recent studies present conflicting evidence about the extent to which dissatisfaction with the Court’s performance affects its public support.
As for “controversies,” by contrast, the federal courts were limited to the adjudication of disputes between parties aligned as Article III specifies.
Adverse Interests and Article III: A Reply · 2017Using data on the common space scores of the federal district judges appointed to the court, and the limited information available on the court's decisions, we explore the implications of this, both for the ideological makeup of the FISA Court's judges and for the oversight function they perform.
Secret Law: The Politics of Appointments to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court · 2015 · DOIThrough a comparative study of lawyers in New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington, I argue that the ideational support provided by lawyers in the form of constitutional arguments has varied widely across the states in response to the legal signals sent by their high courts and the United States Supreme Court.
Lawyers Need Law: Judicial Federalism, State Courts, and Lawyers in Search and Seizure Cases · 2015AbstractThough there has been a substantial amount of research on the strategic behavior of legal actors, the literature is rife with conflicting findings.
How a refined view of federalism should influence legislators looking to reauthorize NCLB, however, has not been adequately addressed in the literature.
An Increased Role for the Department of Education in Addressing Federalism Concerns · 2012As one study pronounced make no mistake, quiet and intentional revolution has been under way in Washington that needs to be studied and given a more vigorous debate and more serious comprehension of what is at stake (MacKenzie 2008: vi).
Statutory Qualifications on Appointments: Congressional and Constitutional Choices · 2010With no standard to assess risk that they will lose [section] 1983 claim and face paying plaintiffs' legal fees, schools must either risk losing budgetary funds at time when school programs are already being cut for lack of funding (7) or give in to demands of plaintiffs' lawyers.
"Play in the Joints": The Struggle to Define Permissive Accommodation under the First Amendment · 2008Part I examines current state of Court's free exercise jurisprudence and state of permissive religious accommodation in public schools, arguing that lack of clear guidance from Court has led to inconsistent results that shrink space between what Establishment Clause forbids and what Free Exercise Clause demands.
"Play in the Joints": The Struggle to Define Permissive Accommodation under the First Amendment · 2008But it probably warrants attention that our data show that, of those judges sitting on benches who were formally recruited through partisan elections, 40% were in fact initially appointed to the bench.
8s Halsbury8’ says that even under the Act “ fmacts alleged on the return which were within the jurisdiction of a court oannot be challenged ”; the cases which he cites are inconclusive, but in principle he must be right, since habeas corpus theoretically only lies for defects going to jurisdiction.
This theoretical claim is bolstered by a striking fact: until 2020, the Supreme Court had never dismissed a case for lack of Article III standing when the defendant was a private party on the ground that the injury alleged was insufficient.
The etymological relations between Welsh and Latin are very curious as regards II; but they involve too many features of a language little known to the readers of ' N.
Gubernatorial appoint- ments, while important for courts, state executive agencies, and the US Senate, are understudied (Bernick 2016).
Although scholars have found plentiful anecdotal observations implying the LDP's judicial control, quantitative evidence remains scarce.
Assessing the Conservative Nature of the Supreme Court of Japan via Ideal Point Estimation of Justices · 2025 · DOIBy embedding their historical interpretations within legal rules and procedures, states and political interest groups can make powerful claims about who legitimately belongs to a nation, and whose historical narrations should be validated as true.
Supreme histories and brittle democracies: Courts, law, and contested regimes of historicity · 2025 · DOIWhile many are aware that the Supreme Court allocates seats for the public to view oral arguments, substantive analyses that have measured the motivations for attendance are lacking.
Abstract While we know that women's presence in the legislature positively impacts how citizens view the institution, little is known about the impact of women's presence on the legitimacy of high courts.
The Politics of Women's Presence on High Courts: Bias and the Conditional Nature of Cultivating Legitimacy · 2021 · DOIWe conclude by discussing the need for more research on popular constitutionalists, as little is known about how this group evaluates the judiciary and interprets its actions.
The Chief Justice versus the iconoclast: Popular constitutionalism and support for using “sociological gobbledygook” in legal decisions · 2021 · DOIPast research has revealed conflicting findings regarding the degree to which judges on European apex courts enact their policy preferences or instead disagree on the basis of divergent legal views.
The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway · 2020 · DOI
Most-cited papers in Judicial and Constitutional Studies
- The Influence of Amicus Curiae Briefs on the Supreme Court · University of Pennsylvania Law Review · 2000 · 107 citations
- On the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions · British Journal of Political Science · 2012 · 61 citations
- Estimating Judicial Ideology · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2021 · 58 citations
- The Conceptual History of Social Justice · Political Studies Review · 2005 · 47 citations
- Passing and Strategic Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court · Law & Society Review · 2005 · 44 citations
- Backlash and Judicial Restraint: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights · International Studies Quarterly · 2020 · 41 citations
- Advising and Consenting in the 60-Vote Senate: Strategic Appointments to the Supreme Court · The Journal of Politics · 2007 · 41 citations
- The Judicial Cadre Evaluation System in China: From Quantification to Intra-state Legibility · The China Quarterly · 2015 · 41 citations
- The Role of Corporate Political Connections in Commercial Lawsuits: Evidence From Chinese Courts · Comparative Political Studies · 2020 · 40 citations
- Information, Oral Arguments, and Supreme Court Decision Making · American Politics Research · 2001 · 35 citations
Most recent work
- From Expansion to Erosion: The Global Trajectory of Judicial Independence, 1960–2018 · Sociological Forum · 2026
- Understanding change in jurisprudence · The Journal of Law Economics and Organization · 2026
- BETWEEN DEFERENCE AND DEFIANCE: JUDICIAL AUTHORITY, EXECUTIVE SUPREMACY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL FRAGILITY IN EARLY PAKISTAN (1947–1971) · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- How judges’ social identity impacts reversal decisions: evidence from the transitory promotion of judges · The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization · 2026
- Constitutionalizing the Private Sphere: A Comparative Inquiry <i>by Christina R. Bambrick</i> · Political Science Quarterly · 2026
- Judicial Partisan Loyalty: A Novel Measure of Judicial Behavior and the Senate's Role in Moderating It · Open MIND · 2026
- The Right to Privacy, Personal Autonomy, and Dignity · 2026
- Abundance and the Supreme Court · The Supreme Court Review · 2026
- Backlash Against the Courts: The Path Toward Authoritarianism in Mexico · Law & Policy · 2026
- Extract from Court of Appeal judgment and commentary: the case of ‘Ms Barrett’ · Criminal Justice · 2026
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