An Informational Model of Constitutional Jurisdiction

In shaping constitutional courts’ jurisdictions, societies must contend with the informational challenges associated with rule-making and the distributive politics of granting courts jurisdiction over administrative law-making. Curiously, judges are often granted jurisdiction that seems to create a tension between their ability to acquire information about appropriate rules and to clearly articulate them. In particular, many courts handle the onerous burden of resolving thousands of routine, low-stakes cases of law-application. We develop an informational model of judicial docket style that isolates a tension between information acquisition and quality rulewriting and examine how that tension manifests in the incentives concerning jurisdiction style. Dockets that include a mix of law application and rule construction promote more informed judicial rule construction at the cost of lower quality rules and a greater role of the judiciary in the day to day activity of the state. We develop implications for constitutional design in a liberal democracy. ∗We thank Chuck Cameron, Tiberiu Dragu, John Ferejohn, Pablo Montagnes, and Georg Vanberg for helpful comments and discussions.