An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology – Kevin Cope (University of Virginia)

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Kevin Cope (University of Virginia) discusses his paper "An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology" with Benjamin Kohler (ETH Zurich). In his work, Kevin Cope investigates how to measure judicial ideology and how this construct influences legal decisions. He introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), a new metric based on over 10,000 written evaluations of judges by thousands of jurists collected over three decades. The paper shows that these ideology estimates outperform existing measures in predicting appellate decisions. This innovative dataset opens up new possibilities for empirical research in judicial politics that were previously constrained by limited data.Paper Reference:Kevin Cope – University of VirginiaAn Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology, Political Analysis (forthcoming)https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4742254Audio Credits for Trailer:AllttA by AllttAhttps://youtu.be/ZawLOcbQZ2w