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.
Vande Kamp, G. N. (2021). The Conditioning Role of Judicial Independence in the Exercise of Judicial Review. Journal of Law and Courts, 9(2), 261–282. doi:10.1086/713407
