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The US Supreme Court is the chief institution responsible for guarding minority rights and equality under the law, yet, in order to function authoritatively, the Court depends on a majority of Americans to accept its legitimacy and on policymakers to enforce its rulings. The Rights Paradox confronts this tension, offering a careful conceptualization and theory of judicial legitimacy that emphasizes its connection to social groups. Zilis demonstrates that attitudes toward minorities and other groups are pivotal for shaping popular support for the Court, with the Court losing support when it rules in favor of unpopular groups. Moreover, justices are aware of these dynamics and strategically moderate their decisions when concerned about the Court's legitimacy. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, as well as analysis of Court decision-making across many recent high-profile cases, Zilis examines the implications for 'equal justice under the law' in an era of heightened polarization and conflict

The US Supreme Court is the chief institution responsible for guarding minority rights and equality under the law, yet, in order to function authoritatively, the Court depends on a majority of Americans to accept its legitimacy and on policymakers to enforce its rulings. The Rights Paradox confronts this tension, offering a careful conceptualization and theory of judicial legitimacy that emphasizes its connection to social groups. Zilis demonstrates that attitudes toward minorities and other groups are pivotal for shaping popular support for the Court, with the Court losing support when it rules in favor of unpopular groups. Moreover, justices are aware of these dynamics and strategically moderate their decisions when concerned about the Court's legitimacy. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, as well as analysis of Court decision-making across many recent high-profile cases, Zilis examines the implications for 'equal justice under the law' in an era of heightened polarization and conflict.

Introduction -- Institutional legitimacy, public reactions, and the backlash puzzle -- The dissensus dynamics model : how the national news media cover Supreme Court decisions -- "All private property is now vulnerable" : a case study of consensus, dissent, and media coverage -- "I Respectfully dissent" : a test of dissensus dynamics in newspaper coverage -- Dissent, debate, and depictions of decisions on cable news -- In the court of public opinion -- Cues v. frames : elite competition and media effects after the Supreme Court rules -- The Supreme Court on trial : public opinion and the Obamacare ruling -- Conclusion

AbstractHow do citizens form perceptions about the ideological priorities of insulated institutions? Currently, there is little consensus on how or even whether citizens form such views. Focusing on the Supreme Court, I argue that perceptions of institutional ideology are influenced by an inter-institutional heuristic, or the popular perception that the president directly and indirectly influences the Court's ideological direction. Using a multiple method approach, I demonstrate that citizens perceive the Court's preferences to coincide with the president's, changing predictably in the aggregate and varying substantially at the micro-level. The findings speak to debates about polarization in politics, showing that citizens may perceive insulated institutions as ideologically extreme due to factors beyond their control.

Since 2010, the Supreme Court has handed down a number of landmark decisions which have dramatically increased gay rights in the US. But these decisions have often led to a backlash. Using national survey data, Michael A. Zilis finds that the Supreme Court's decisions actually undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of those who dislike gays, despite the Court's fundamental mission to protect the rights of vulnerable groups.

This paper introduces a new perspective into the literature on judicial legitimacy by examining the incentives for courts to cater to a popular majority and offering a novel model of legitimacy that has consequences for judicial responsiveness. The account integrates into the literature classic research on how strategic social groups shape public opinion. I theorize that citizens use their perceptions of the judiciary's support for various social groups as a means to assess the institution overall. From this insight, I derive specific expectations about the conditions under which the Supreme Court's protection of minority groups like gays and immigrants can damage its legitimacy. Using national survey data, I demonstrate that dislike for the beneficiaries of recent Court rulings systematically diminishes the institution's legitimacy. The influence of these group-based considerations shapes individual-level attitude change and can be observed at various points in time.

AbstractPerceptions of procedural fairness influence the legitimacy of the law and because procedures are mutable, reforming them can buttress support for the rule of law. Yet legal authorities have recently faced a distinct challenge: accusations of impropriety based on their ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). We study the effect of these traits in the context of the U.S. legal system, focusing on the conditions under which citizens perceive female and minority judges as exhibiting impropriety and how this compares with perceptions of their white and male counterparts. We find that Americans use a judge's race and gender to make inferences about which groups the judge favors, whether she is inherently biased, and whether she should recuse. Notably, we find drastically different evaluations of female and Hispanic judges among the political right and left.

ObjectiveTo explore the political impact of overt resistance to judicial rulings. Existing approaches to answering this question rely on a framework that overlooks important components of how resistance resonates in the modern era.MethodsFocusing on the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges and resistance by local county clerks, we model the relationship between resistance and public opinion. We demonstrate that disobedience affected the media's framing of same‐sex marriage, changing it from an issue framed primarily around equal rights to one in which alternative, anti‐same‐sex marriage frames proliferated. We then use these frames to design an externally valid survey experiment, which we administer to a national sample.ResultsWe find that resistance framing depresses support for same‐sex marriage and increases support for defying the Court.ConclusionThe findings suggest that political resistance to the judiciary continues to resonate in the modern era, although not in the ways that many assume.

The separation-of-powers literature focuses on how the preferences of one branch constrain the behavior of its counterparts. Yet, in much of this work, scholars do not address how responsive behavior varies across particular members. Focusing on Court curbing legislation in Congress, we develop a model of heterogeneous responsiveness. Our theory identifies two distinct mechanisms that underpin responsiveness in judicial behavior, implying that the chief justice and the most moderate (swing) justice are more likely than their colleagues to adjust their behavior in response to external threats from Congress. We find that these two justices are significantly less likely to vote to invalidate legislation than their colleagues during periods of heightened Court curbing and provide evidence that distinct mechanisms shape their behaviors. In addition, we offer justice-specific evidence using a pre–post promotion analysis, demonstrating that Justice Rehnquist became responsive to Court curbing only after becoming chief justice. Our model highlights the micro-level underpinnings of judicial responsiveness to inter-institutional politics and, most broadly, speaks to the need for separation-of-powers models to differentiate the preferences of individual political actors when seeking to understand inter-institutional responsiveness.