May it please the twitterverse: The use of Twitter by state high court judges

ABSTRACT

This article examines the extent to which Twitter has been adopted by judges on state supreme courts, and how these judges use the platform. While social media usage by other politicians has been examined in a variety of contexts, judges have been universally ignored. We find that elected judges are more likely to use Twitter, primarily to engage with the public. Additionally, while they do not engage with the public like traditional politicians, they increase Twitter use overall and tweet more election-related rhetoric in election years. This work extends the audiences literature in judicial politics to extra-judicial behavior of judges.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• judges
• state supreme courts
• judicial elections

Notes

1. 536 U.S. 765 (2002).

2. Hall (2014) documents the rise and effect of negative campaign advertisements in judicial elections, the majority are not strictly policy based, beyond “weak on crime.”

3. Only the states of Illinois and Louisiana elect their judges within districts.

4. http://iowapublicradio.org/post/should-iowa-ditch-judicial-retention-elections#stream/.

5. See Justice Caleb Stegall who writes “Notes from Mud Creek” in his hometown newspaper.

6. https://twitter.com/JusticeCStegall/status/991805811813945344.

7. When the data was collected for this study, Twitter had yet to expand the length of tweets to 280 characters.

8. At least five additional state high court judges have private Twitter accounts: Justice Tommy Bryan (@JudgeTommyBryan) of the Supreme Court of Alabama, Justice Keith Blackwell (@JudgeBlackwell) of the Supreme Court of Georgia, Justice John Cannon Few (@jcfew) of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, Judge Mary Lou Keel (@MaryLouKeel) of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and Justice Paul Green (@PaulWGreen2) of the Supreme Court of Texas. However, it is worth noting that since our initial data collection, Justice Few has made his account public and began actively tweeting. Additionally, several judges have public accounts that have not sent any tweets: Justices Robert Brutinel (@rbrutinel) and Clint Bolick (@JusticeBolick) of the Arizona Supreme Court, Justice Leigh Saufley (@lsaufley) of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Justice Brian Zahra (@LogicLawLiberty) of the Michigan Supreme Court, Justice Lidia Stiglich (@lidia_stiglich) of the Supreme Court of Nevada, and Justice Barbara Vigil (@JudgeVigil) of the Supreme Court of New Mexico.

9. www.tweepy.org.

10. Due to limitation in our ability to collect all tweets from the most extreme outliers in terms of Twitter usage, our data on annual Twitter activity and tweet content excludes Justice Bridget Mary McCormack (@BridgetMaryMc) of the Michigan Supreme Court, Justice Barbara Jackson (@JudgeJackson) of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and Justices Jeff Brown (@judgejeffbrown) and Don Willet (@JusticeWillett) of the Supreme Court of Texas.

11. While Justice R. Patrick DeWine (@patdewine) of the Supreme Court of Ohio has the oldest Twitter account of any state high court judge serving in July 2017 as he joined Twitter in 2008, he was not a state high court judge when he did so having been first elected to the Supreme Court of Ohio in 2016.

12. Subsequent to our data collection, one judge from a state with appointed state high court judges became an active Twitter user.

13. While sending 100 tweets over the life of one’s account is not necessarily heavy use in comparison to many Twitter users, a more stringent definition of “heavy user” such as sending an average of 100 tweets per year or 1000 tweets over the life of the account would include only a handful of state high court judges. Compared to the 29 defined as heavy users under the current definition, only 11 would be using the definition of 100 tweets per year and only 8 using the definition of 1000 lifetime tweets.

14. As noted above, we are unable to gather all data on the individual tweets of Justices McCormack (Michigan), Jackson (North Carolina), and Brown and Willet (Texas). Thus, these four judges are excluded from all data presented in Figures 4–7.

15. Our structural topic model was estimated using the stm package for R (Roberts et al., 2014).

16. Full results and discussion of the regression model provided in the appendix.

17. All seven topics are significant if we use the weaker threshold of p < 0.1 for determining statistical significance.

18. We only display 4 topics because of length concerns. They were chosen specifically because they allowed the easiest visual interpretation.

19. Minus some obvious elected officials whose “style” is not typical in any sense of the word.

20. Summary of a nationally representative sample, available here: http://www.justiceatstake.org/media/cms/PollingsummaryFINAL_9EDA3EB3BEA78.pdf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Todd A. Curry

Todd A. Curry is an associate professor of Political Science at The University of Texas of El Paso. His interests include Judicial Communication and Indigenous Peoples and the law. He tweets at @DrToddACurry.

Michael P. Fix

Michael P. Fix is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University. His research focuses on the evolution of law and policy over time with a specific focus on the U.S. states. He tweets at @mpfix1.