New Data on Court Curbing by State Legislatures

Abstract

The examination of the interaction between the institutions in American state politics has long suffered from a dearth of data. This is the case despite the importance of understanding the separation of powers in the states and the specific effects on policy making and policy outcomes. In this article, I introduce a new, original dataset of court-curbing introductions by state legislators. The data include information on more than 1,200 state legislative bills that would restrict the power of the courts. In this article, I provide descriptive statistics for the data, employ the data to test hypotheses, and explain how this data may be used in future scholarly research on the interactions between state legislators and state courts.