Students of comparative law have long argued that undermining judicial independence is electorally costly, and that the norms against interference uphold institutional checks and balances essential to constitutionalism. However, evidence from countries with robust judiciaries suggests that exposing voters to deficiencies in the legal process or the courts’ partisan leanings can reduce perceptions of judicial legitimacy, making such interference on part of would-be authoritarians more likely. The rise of populist politicians poses additional risks: by emphasizing judges’ unelected status and counter-majoritarian tendencies, populists may erode legitimacy, framing judges as part of a “corrupt elite” opposing “the people.” This rhetoric challenges liberal-democratic norms that limit state interference with individual rights. To test whether one observes the effects of partisanship and procedural fairness on voters’ perceptions of the courts outside the US context, and whether populist messages produce comparable effects, a pre-registered survey experiment is conducted in the context of Czechia, a country that, until recently, has had both a populist executive and a strong and independent Constitutional Court. The study presented respondents with vignettes describing an important electoral ruling of the Czech Constitutional Court, embedding messages that highlighted judges’ unelected status, the ruling’s procedural irregularities, or its partisan implications. Contrary to expectations, findings show no significant effects of any message type on perceptions of judicial legitimacy. The results of the study suggest that the marginalization of robust judiciaries in backsliding democracies may be a largely elite-driven institutional process, with uncertain electoral payoffs.

Explanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts’ sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped than the Court of Justice to compel national governments to comply with EU law. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU's preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transfer of legitimacy depends on citizens’ views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.

How does oral argument attendance impact public perceptions of the judiciary? Judicial independence is partly contingent on public support, but the conditions that generate institutional good will are not well understood. We examine how judicial outreach and court exposure inform public attitudes. Leveraging a field-experiment randomizing in-person attendance at oral arguments conducted by a federal circuit court of appeals on a university campus, we find that exposure increases perceptions of institutional legitimacy and the extent to which judicial decisions are motivated by law versus politics. The results have important implications for judicial politics and policy debates concerning reform initiatives involving circuit riding, courtroom cameras, and public outreach.

In recent years, the emerging field of comparative constitutional law has been swept by a new approach with a scientific allure known as the Large-N approach. The methodology of this approach requires flattening the world of constitutional law by reducing the meaning of constitutional determinations into countable data. One of the difficulties in resisting this trend is that while many constitutional scholars have offered accounts that do not flatten the world of constitutional law, their methodology remains unarticulated and rarely discussed. Paul Kahn is one of the few scholars who offered an account of how to conduct non-doctrinal research of constitutional law. This Article aims to distil several principles of Kahn’s methodology, discuss its limitations, and demonstrate why it is superior to the Large-N approach. To achieve these goals, I chose to focus on three books on the German constitutional system that are based on dissertations written at Yale University, where Kahn teaches. Based on my discussion of these three books, I argue that Kahn’s methodology offers an approach which I dub the “Rich Picture” approach (or Rich-P). The Rich-P approach exposes that participants in a constitutional discourses understand constitutional materials, such as constitutional documents or judicial opinions, through a conceptual array that varies between legal orders. Without acknowledging the conceptual “eyeglasses” we wear when investigating constitutional determinations, measurements of the entire world of constitutionalism may lead to catchy soundbites and tweets, but to conclusions that are misleading at best.

How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public’s outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy’s shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will.

Public support is a critical component of any court’s institutional legitimacy. Understanding the roots and durability of such support is therefore crucial. This article uses survey data to explore public attitudes towards Canadian courts from 2008 to 2019. This time period is especially relevant given the comparatively tumultuous relationship between the Supreme Court and the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Notably, partisanship now appears to be a defining characteristic of court support in Canada, with Conservative Party supporters being less likely to support the courts. While institutional trust is also found to be a strong predictor of court support, this suggests public attitudes towards Canadian courts may no longer be as well shielded from the effects of changing political circumstances as they once were.

Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.

Does the use of judicial review by unelected judges harm public support for their decisions? Scholars have often answered this question in the affirmative. We examine the extent to which the use of judicial review reduces the ability of judges to achieve acceptance of their decisions, arguing that decisions made by elected judges may be more palatable to the public. Our experimental evidence demonstrates that the public is less prone to accept both decisions made by appointed judges and judicial decisions that strike down laws. However, the public is no more likely to accept the use of judicial review by an appointed court than an elected court. The results have implications both for institutional design in the American states and the microfoundations of judicial independence.

International actors and observers have afforded greater attention in recent years to the role of national courts in bringing to justice perpetrators of international crimes. Not only are national courts typically less expensive to operate than international courts, they also enjoy at times more legitimacy in the eyes of local constituencies than their international counterparts. They can also reach deeper into society and cast a wider net than international criminal courts. Indeed, there is an increased tendency to view international criminal courts as mechanisms primarily designed to support and complement the work of national criminal procedures, and to pay closer attention to the interaction between the two sets of judicial institutions. It is against this background that the Project on Studying the Impact of International Courts in Domestic Criminal Procedures in Mass Atrocity Cases (the DOMAC project) has sought to draw lessons from the experience accumulated by the interactions that took place between national and international courts in the two decades that have passed since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This was done in the hope that such lessons may guide such interactions in the future. Indeed, DOMAC reports have looked into interactions relating to specific legal aspects (applicable laws, prosecution rates, sentencing policies and capacity development) and/or at specific geographical regions (for example, the Balkans, Africa, Latin America, East Timor) and provide many interesting stories of success and failure, from which valuable lessons can be learned. The purpose of this article is to offer, on the basis of the said DOMAC reports, some general observations on the impact of international courts on domestic criminal processes (in the aftermath of mass atrocity situations), and to discuss the structural deficiencies that may have led until now to sub-optimal levels of cooperation and division of labour between international and national criminal procedures. On the basis of these critical observations, a number of general recommendations for future policy planners will be considered. The article first describes some of the main impacts of international courts on domestic courts handling mass atrocity cases. It then discusses four overarching problems, which may have hampered such interactions: the lack of a comprehensive legal response to mass atrocities, inadequate allocation of resources, the absence of ultimate responsibility over the international response, and legitimacy deficits. The concluding section sketches a number of proposals based on the discussion in the two immediately preceding sections.