Blawgging the Bench: Investigating Judicial Responsiveness to Legal Elites

Can law professors influence court decisions? Courts and individual judges may care about the legal community's attention to and approval of their work for reasons of institutional legitimacy and personal prestige. This paper serves evidence that salience of a case to relevant professional communities can affect case outcomes. Leveraging law blogs, or “blawgs,” covering proceedings in front of the European Court of Justice as novel data on legal case salience, I consider whether the attention given to a case by elite legal audiences leads judges to increase the justification of their decisions. I find a significant and substantive positive effect of salience on how deeply judges embed their decisions in case law. However, this effect appears to be conditional on the timing of coverage linked to the institutional features of the court. I argue that legal elites may thus serve both as a crucial compliance constituency and a sounding board for legal evolution.