Coverage and commentary on the JuDJIS project.
October 1, 2025 — A short post flagging the newly published Political Analysis article, noting that the JuDJIS method “derives from computational text analysis of over 20,000 written evaluations by a representative sample of tens of thousands of jurists” and represents the first dynamic, potentially multi-dimensional measure of its kind.
Read more →August 12, 2025 — A video interview in which Prof. Kevin Cope walks through the JuDJIS methodology and findings from “An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology” with Benjamin Kohler of ETH Zurich’s Center for Law & Economics.
Read more →June 19, 2025 — In a deep dive on measuring circuit-judge ideology through opinion language, Feldman places JuDJIS within a growing body of text-based ideology research, noting that “Cope (2024) shows how linguistic structure maps to judicial alignment.”
Read more →February 11, 2025 — […] Cope developed a new way to look at the ideological bent of a judge, called Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores. The score, assigned to nearly all Article III judges serving since the 1990s, is based on qualitative evaluations by a representative sample of thousands of lawyers and legal experts familiar with the judges’ performance on the bench.
He said the average JuDJIS score of Trump’s 54 appellate court appointees is 0.25, with −1 being liberal and +1 being conservative. The average score of Trump’s four Third Circuit appointees is slightly lower, at 0.24…
Read more →January 30, 2024 — A breakthrough new empirical initiative developed by University of Virginia School of Law professor Kevin Cope could provide the most accurate estimate to date of federal judges’ ideologies, using automated analysis of text to evaluate lawyers’ written observations. …
Cope started the project, called the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores — or JuDJIS, pronounced “judges” — in 2016, but it arrives in another presidential election year, a time when court watchers speculate about potential judicial nominees and how their ideology might shape the direction of society.
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