Chad L Westerland

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Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Westerland, C. L. (2017).

  The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior and the Separation of Powers

  . doi:10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199579891.013.4
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  Book chapter

Chapters

• Westerland, C. L. (2024). Measuring Ideology. In Research Handbook of Judicial Politics. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Westerland, C. L. (2017). Strategic Analysis and Judicial Decision Making. In Oxford Handbook of US Judicial Behavior. Oxford.
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  Book has release date of Aug 2017.

Journals/Publications

• Schuler, P., & Westerland, C. (2022). Reconsidering the Rubber Stamp Thesis: A Consolidation Theory of Oil Expropriations and Legislatures in Party-based Autocracies. Studies in Comparative International Development, 57(2). doi:10.1007/s12116-022-09354-z
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  Growing conventional wisdom suggests that authoritarian legislatures prevent oil nationalizations in party-based regimes. However, country scholars and media outlets remain skeptical. We develop a theory aligning with the skeptics. We argue that oil expropriations and legislative closures are endogenous to the process of the consolidation of party-based autocracies. New authoritarian parties close legislatures when they seize power and do not reopen them until they can ensure their dominance of the new legislature, a process abetted by oil expropriations. We test the argument using recently developed cross-case comparative Bayesian qualitative techniques. Evidence shows support for our theory. Our findings suggest that authoritarian legislatures are less constraining in terms of oil nationalizations than new conventional wisdom suggests. Additionally, our evidence points to a different interpretation of the role legislatures play in the evolution of authoritarian regimes.
• Westerland, C. (2013). Review of Geyh, When Courts Collide: The Struggle for Control of America's Judicial System. Justice System Journal.
• Westerland, C. L., Epstein, L., Segal, J., Cameron, C., & Comparato, S. (2009). Strategic Defiance in the US Courts of Appeals. American Journal of Political Science.
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  This article examines how US Courts of Appeals respond to Supreme Court precedents.;Your Role: Lead author;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Other faculty members at other institutions;
• Westerland, C. L., Jones, B., Branton, R., & Cassesse, E. (2010). All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation, Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration. Journal of Politics.
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• Westerland, C. L., Jones, B., Cassese, E., & Branton, R. (2011). All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration. Journal of Politics.
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  ;Your Role: author;Full Citation: Branton, Regina, Erin Cassese, Bradford Jones, and Chad Westerland. 2011. All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration. Journal of Politics. 73: 664-679.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: collaborative with non-UA faculty;
• Westerland, C. L., Segal, J., & Lindquist, S. (2011). Congress, the Supreme Court, and Judicial Review. American Journal of Political Science.
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  ;Full Citation: Segal, Jeffrey A., Chad Westerland, and Stefanie Lindquist. 2011. Congress, the Supreme Court and Judicial Review. American Journal of Political Science. 55: 89-104.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: collaborative with non-UA faculty;
• Westerland, C. L., Epstein, L., Segal, J., Cameron, C., & Comparato, S. (2010). Strategic Defiance in the US Courts of Appeals. American Journal of Political Science.
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  ;Your Role: Lead author;Full Citation: Westerland, Chad, Lee Epstein, Jeffrey A. Segal, Charles Cameron, and Scott Comparato. 2010. “Strategic Defiance and Compliance in the U.S. Courts of Appeals.” American Journal of Political Science. 54: 891-905.;
• Westerland, C. (2008). When Courts and Congress Collide: The Struggle for Control of America's Judicial System. Justice System Journal, 29(2).
• Epstein, L., Martin, A. D., Segal, J. A., & Westerland, C. (2007). The Judicial Common Space. Journal of Law Economics & Organization, 23(2), 303-325. doi:10.1093/jleo/ewm024
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  To say that positive political theory (PPT) scholarship on the hierarchy of justice is theory rich and data poor is to make a rather uncontroversial claim. For over a decade now, scholars have offered intriguing theoretical accounts aimed at understanding why lower courts defy (comply with) higher courts. But only rarely do they subject the accounts to rigorous empirical interrogation. The chief obstacle, it seems, is the lack of a reliable and valid measurement strategy for placing judges of lower courts and justices of higher courts in the same policy space. Without such a strategy, we can systematically test few, if any, hypotheses flowing from PPT models of the judicial hierarchy. With such an approach not only can we investigate the implications of these models, we can assess many others flowing from the larger PPT program on judging, as well. It is to the challenge of scaling judges and justices (as well as legislatures and executives) that we turn in this article. We begin by explicating our measurement strategy, and then by explaining its advantages over previous efforts. Next we explore the results of our approach and provide a descriptive look at data it yields: a “Judicial Common Space” (JCS) score for all justices and judges appointed since 1953. The last section offers three applications designed to shore up the suitability and adaptability of the JCS for a range of positive projects on the courts.
• Epstein, L., Lindstadt, R., Segal, J. A., & Westerland, C. (2006). The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees. The Journal of Politics, 68(2), 296-307. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00407.x
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  A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senate's voting over presidential nominees—a regime that deemphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested.In this paper we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo L. Black in 1937 through John G. Roberts, Jr. in 2005.Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importance of ideology has reached new heights, the Senate's emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidate's prof...
• Segal, J. A., & Westerland, C. (2005). The Supreme Court, Congress, and Judicial Review. North Carolina Law Review, 83(5).
• Buckley, J., & Westerland, C. (2004). Duration Dependence, Functional Form, and Corrected Standard Errors: Improving EHA Models of State Policy Diffusion. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 4(1), 94-113. doi:10.1177/153244000400400105
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  Discrete event history analysis (EHA) is the analytic tool of choice for many scholars of policy diffusion across American states. Unfortunately, the policy diffusion literature largely ignores several important specification issues for EHA models: duration dependence, choice of functional form, and the computation of standard errors corrected for temporal and spatial dependence. We use data from Berry and Berry's (1990) seminal study of state lottery diffusion to demonstrate ways to deal properly with these issues.

Presentations

• Schuler, P. J., & Westerland, C. L. (2018, August). Reconsidering the Rubber Stamp Thesis: A Consolidation Theory of Expropriations and Legislatures in Party-based Autocracies. APSA.
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  Paper presented at 2018 APSA - subsequently nominated for best mixed methods paper presented at the conference
• Westerland, C. L., & Lopez, E. (2012, 2012-04-01). In Whose Interest? Examining Latino Judges Decision Making on US Courts of Appeals. MPSA. Chicago.
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  ;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Westerland, C. L. (2011, 2011-02-01). Consquences of Immigration Reform. University of Arizona - Sociology.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;

Reviews

• Westerland, C. L. (2025.

  The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

  (pp 34-37).