State Courts, State Legislatures, and Setting Abortion Policy.

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court decided in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization (597 U.S. (2022)) to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, a seismic shift in abortion policy that makes the states key battlegrounds in fights over abortion and broader reproductive rights. This article focuses on the role of state supreme courts in setting state abortion policies. Using an original data set of state court decisions surrounding abortion from the past 20 years, the authors investigate how two overarching factors affect state supreme court decision-making on abortion. First, they track how states' political environments affect the decisions courts make about access to abortion. Second, the authors consider the scope of the abortion policy considered by the courts. The authors find that the partisan makeup of state legislatures does not influence the direction of state supreme courts' rulings on abortion issues, but it does affect the scope of abortion regulation being considered by the courts. Additionally, they find that elected judges tend to be more responsive to constituent preferences when ruling on abortion policies. Overall, these findings illustrate the multifaceted dynamics involved in state supreme courts' rulings on abortion.

Counterevidence of crime-reduction effects from federal grants of military equipment to local police.

In 2017, the Trump Administration restored local law enforcement agencies' access to military weapons and some other types of surplus military equipment (SME) that had been prohibited by the Obama Administration. The Justice Department background paper used to justify this decision cited two papers published by the American Economic Association. These papers used SME data collected with a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request and concluded that SME, supplied to local law enforcement by the federal government via the 1033 Program, reduces crime. Here we show that the findings of these studies are not credible due to problems with the data. Using more detailed audit data on 1033 SME, we show that the 2014 data are flawed and that the more recent data provide no evidence that 1033 SME reduces crime.