Publications:
Kim,Jeong H., Anna Gunderson, Elizabeth A. Lane, Nichole M. Bauer. “State Courts, State Legislatures, and Setting Abortion Policy.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, (2023); 10449887.
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Armaly, Miles T., & Lane, Elizabeth. A. (2022). Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court. American Politics Research, 51(1) (2023): 23–36.
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Lane, Elizabeth. A. (2022). A Separation-of-Powers Approach to the Supreme Court’s Shrinking Caseload. Journal of Law and Courts, 10(1), 000-000.
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Schoenherr, Jessica A., Elizabeth A. Lane, and Miles T. Armaly. 2020. “The Purpose of Senatorial Grandstanding during Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings.” Journal of Law and Courts 8(2): 333-358.
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Working Papers:
Lane, Elizabeth A. “Does Law Constrain or Policy Prevail? The Effect of Litigant Case Strength on U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making.”
2019 Best Graduate Student Paper, Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association and 2019 Best Graduate Student Paper, Michigan Political Science Association
What happens when law and ideology come in conflict in a case? Research has revealed at the agenda stage, there are two types of decisions Supreme Court justices make. The first occurs when law supports their policy preferences and encourages them to vote sincerely. The second is the focus of this essay. It arises when justices? ideological preferences and law are at odds. Using novel data, I develop a measure of litigant legal argument quality to evaluate this relationship at the merits stage. I argue that this relationship is conditional on certain justice and case-level factors. To test this I classify whether justices? votes on the merits are policy consistent or inconsistent and examine deviations from policy in the votes justices cast. I find that all justices are constrained by law, but moderate justices are constrained most often, whereas justices at the ideological poles still vote their preferences a majority of the time.
Lane, Elizabeth A. and Jessica A. Schoenherr. “Hidden Successes: Briefs, Oral Arguments, and Gender Roles at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
At the United States Supreme Court, the attorneys who oversee the creation and presentation of parties’ legal arguments are overwhelmingly male. One dominant explanation for this gender gap suggests female attorneys are less likely to win. Using a novel dataset that identifies the counsel of record that supervised the creation of the brief and the oral advocate who presented the argument to the justices, our results suggest women succeed at the Supreme Court when they are placed in the right positions. We find the justices are significantly more likely to side with a party represented by a fe- male counsel of record than they are to side with party that hired a man for the same position. But we also see that parties can do worse if they ask a woman to appear as oral advocate, though having an all-female litigation leadership team is still better than having an all-male one.
Lane, Elizabeth A. and Jessica A. Schoenherr. “A Winning Strategy: How Attorneys Use Vanity Citations to Sway Justices.”
Discussions about Supreme Court decision-making almost always devolve into conversations about attorney strategy toward the median justice. Such conversations suggest attorneys are strategic in how they approach the justices, carefully crafting their briefs and oral argument discussions to persuade at least five justices to their side. We seek to better understand how attorneys appearing before the Supreme Court appeal to the justices’ preferences and obtain their votes. Using citation data from a random sample of 75 search and seizure and Establishment Clause cases, we analyze the frequency with which attorneys cite sitting Supreme Court justices’ past decisions and the factors that influence their decision to do so. We then use that information to see if the attorneys’ strategic behavior effectively convinces the justices to side with them.
Lane, Elizabeth A. and Jessica A. Schoenherr. “Research Note: Identifying Racial and Ethnic Representation in the Supreme Court Bar.”
While the public views diverse institutions as more legitimate and institutions produce more representative outcomes as they diversify, the Supreme Court bar remains a mostly male and mostly White institution. Research shows the justices notice female advocates and respond to them in a number of ways that make it harder for female advocates to do their jobs well. This behavior makes it harder for women to join the bar and for the Court to reap the benefits of diversity. Do the justices similarly modify their behavior when they see a Black, Latinx, or Asian American attorney at the lectern? To answer this question, we need to identify the racial and ethnic composition of the Supreme Court bar. Using a combination of expert coding and crowdsourcing, we attempt to identify the racial and ethnic backgrounds of the 207 attorneys who appeared at Supreme Court oral argument between the 2015 and 2018 terms. Our results suggest that while expert coding is the best method of identifying attorneys’ racial and ethnic identities, data availability is illusive, and studying these attorneys’ impacts on the Supreme Court will remain difficult as a result.
Lane, Elizabeth A., Jessica A. Schoenherr, and Jamil S. Scott. “Cases but no Controversies: Public Response to the Justices Unrobed.”
Controversies, ethical violations, and scandals are commonplace in modern American politics, and the reaction to them — by politicians and the public alike — dictate a civil servant’s fate. In some situations, members of the government will continue to serve, but in extreme circumstances, their political career can come to an early conclusion. The severity of the controversy certainly affects the outcome, but does the profile of the official matter too? In this paper, we examine if the mass public holds different types of civil servants to different standards when deciding how to respond to political controversy. More specifically, we use a survey experiment to examine if the gender of the individual and the government branch in which they serve influences attitudes. We hypothesize that women officials are less likely to escape political controversy unscathed than are their male counterparts. Furthermore, we contend that members of the judiciary are held to higher ethical standards and therefore are more severely punished following a controversy than members of the legislative or executive branches. Moreover, we take into account how partisanship might act as a filter for how political controversy is perceived in one’s own party versus the other.