These Estimable Courts, by Damon M. Cann and Jeff Yates, is a compelling piece of social science research that significantly enhances our understanding of public opinion about state courts. In this short and eminently readable book, Cann and Yates draw on original data to persuasively argue that citizens’ views of state high courts are driven by knowledge of and experience with judicial institutions, perceptions of how courts and judges conduct their business, and views about the efficacy of courts in the policy-making process. The book is wide ranging: it examines citizens’ knowledge of judicial institutions, their experience with the machinery of justice, diffuse support for state high courts, citizen understanding of judicial decision making, and even perceptions of the policies produced by courts. Despite this considerable breadth, Cann and Yates are able to skillfully weave together two of the most vibrant threads of scholarship in judicial politics: judicial legitimacy and judicial impact.

The authors begin by pointing out that the vast majority of work done by courts in the United States is done by state courts, and as a result, most real-world contact between courts and citizens occurs at the state level. Yet the overwhelming emphasis in the judicial legitimacy literature is on federal courts, especially the Supreme Court of the United States. Recognizing the reality of citizen–court interactions, Cann and Yates take up the mantle and conduct a systematic examination of citizen attitudes about state judicial institutions.

To do so, they examine state-level public opinion of judicial institutions, not by gathering representative data from each state, but by estimating state-level opinion from a large and high-quality nationally representative sample—original modules placed on the 2010 and 2012 administrations of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES)—using a technique known as multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP). These data alone constitute a worthwhile contribution to the literature on public views of state courts.

The authors explore five topics over the course of the book. Each empirical chapter examines a distinct area of interest: Chapter 3 explores the determinants of the institutional legitimacy of state high courts, Chapter 4 focuses on perceptions of judicial decision making, Chapter 5 considers citizens’ views on judicial policy making and impact, Chapter 6 turns to judicial selection, and Chapter 7 explores the relationship between perceptions of judicial legitimacy and obedience to the law. A key takeaway of the book as a whole is that all of the attitudes explored in these chapters are related in theoretically tractable ways. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is the care that the authors take to identify the interrelationships between these concepts of interest.

Concerning the legitimacy of state courts—which in many ways is the topic at the heart of this book and the one that ties the rest together—Cann and Yates argue that knowledge of courts and policy agreement with court decisions strongly enhance legitimacy. Conversely, perceptions of judges as activists, subscribing to the view that personal preferences and ideology influence judicial decisions (so-called legal realism), or living in states with elected high-court judges are associated with significantly lower legitimacy. Much of this is consistent with the broader literature on judicial legitimacy. One of these key findings, however, is more controversial. Among the most important and interesting contributions of the book is the strong and robust finding, developed in Chapters 3 and 4, that citizens’ policy agreement with court outputs is powerfully associated with judicial legitimacy. In this way, Cann and Yates level a significant challenge to positivity theory, as developed by James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira. This will likely be a key site of debate in the legitimacy literature for some time to come.

From here the authors turn to judicial impact, which they define as court influence in “the overall policy outputs of state government” (p. 83). But as in the rest of the book, their question does not concern the actual extent of judicial impact, but rather citizen perceptions of impact and how those perceptions are related to other attitudes about courts. They argue that, like assessments of judicial legitimacy, beliefs about judicial impact are powerfully informed by citizens’ knowledge of courts and policy agreement with court decisions.

In other words, knowledge of courts and policy agreement with court outputs drive both judicial legitimacy and perceptions of judicial efficacy. In the authors’ words, “knowledge of courts is associated with what might be described as ‘positive’ feelings toward courts on two counts—they are legitimate and important policymakers” (p. 97). By the same token, respondents who agree with judicial outputs view the court as more legitimate and as an important policy maker. In this way, Cann and Yates show that a variety of citizen attitudes about courts and their outputs are tightly interwoven. This finding has important implications—for example, perhaps “specific” and “diffuse” support for courts are more closely linked than we have long thought—and should be taken seriously by scholars working on questions concerning public opinion of courts.

For all its considerable strengths, the book’s shortcomings must also be noted. First, if a great value of the book is the argument that policy agreement drives legitimacy, then the measurement of policy agreement becomes quite important. Yet the authors do not actually measure policy agreement with the courts. Instead they ask the sample, “How often would you say you agree with the decisions reached by your state’s highest court?” (p. 140). This key question, meant to tap actual policy agreement, assumes that citizens have monitored their state court and have knowledge of multiple specific decisions it has rendered. These are very strong assumptions indeed. Second, and more importantly, the analyses underpinning the arguments discussed earlier are correlational. There is no experimental component, no leveraging of the panel structure of the CCES, to pin down the causal story. For this reason, we simply cannot be sure in which direction the causal arrow runs: perhaps people who like their court merely assume that their policy preferences are winning more often than not, for example.

These criticisms aside, These Estimable Courts is an important book that contributes to numerous debates in the literature. After reading it, we are left with a richer understanding of public opinion of state courts. The book is accessible enough to be read by undergraduate students and would make a great addition to undergraduate and graduate course syllabuses on the topics of courts, state politics, and public opinion.