The Conditioning Role of Judicial Independence in the Exercise of Judicial Review

Abstract

Scholars recognize that judicial review depends upon judicial independence: an independent court is more likely to invalidate a statute it opposes than a nonindependent court. But scholars have lost that the previous statement is a conditional relationship, in which judicial independence moderates the relationship between a court’s ideological preferences and its decision to strike statutes. I model this conditional relationship using the US Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions on important federal statutes. The analysis reveals that judicial independence is best modeled as a conditional predictor of judicial review and that modeling judicial independence as an additive predictor risks false negative results.