The Politics of Principles

The public conversation about the contemporary American judiciary places front and center the practical political effects of how judges employ legal reasoning. Just consider how President Biden's July 2024 pitch to reform the Supreme Court emphasized the Court's "dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents" or how CNN news coverage of the Court's 2023 term highlighted that "Chief Justice John Roberts accused the liberal dissenters" in a case about President Trump's immunity from criminal prosecution "of 'fear mongering' and 'ignoring' fundamental constitutional principles." Popular discussion of the courts connects legal principles such as precedent, original meaning, and textualism to political outcomes on high-profile issues.

These patterns raise important questions that existing academic research does not address. When politicians and the media choose to talk about the Court, why do they discuss seemingly esoteric legal principles that do not appear directly relatable to ordinary Americans? What consequences does exposure to legal principles have for how Americans evaluate the Court and its behavior? Our book tackles these questions by explaining the politics of principles: the political incentives that lead elected officials and the media to discuss the Court in terms of legal principles and the downstream consequences of this behavior for how Americans view the politics of the judicial branch. So doing, we contribute theoretically and empirically to scholarly literatures in the study of American politics and the law.

Our two-part theoretical argument elaborates the strategic choices politicians and the news media make in choosing to communicate about the political consequences of legal principles (Principles Transmission Theory) and explains how the public will internalize this discussion and use legal principles to evaluate the judiciary (Principles Evaluation Theory). Using a wealth of novel text as data, we catalog how political and media elites use the language of legal principles in their discussions of the judiciary, document the political divisions in these communications, and illustrate how strategic goals shape this behavior. With a range of original surveys, we illustrate how these messages are internalized by the public and show that legal principles matter for how Americans evaluate judges and nominees, decisions, and judicial policymaking.

The Politics of Principles: Elite Legal Rhetoric and Americans' Attitudes toward the Courts (coauthored with Albert H. Rivero) provides novel insight into the political importance of elite legal rhetoric and its consequences for American public opinion. Our perspective is especially timely in an era of polarized judicial nominations, proposals for judicial reform, and ideological judicial policymaking.

In our paper, "The American Public's Attitudes over How Judges Use Legal Principles to Make Decisions" (Political Science Research and Methods), we present some of our findings on the nature, source, and consequences of the American public's attitudes over the use of these principles.