Litigant Status and Social Impact: Analyzing the Norwegian Supreme Court's Discretionary Jurisdiction

Courts of precedent are key national actors who exercise their broad discretionary jurisdiction to select appeals to influence social, economic, and political policies. Although researchers have used the relative appellant advantage to show that courts prefer appeals from more resourceful litigants, data limitations have prevented researchers from demonstrating that configurations of litigant pairs provide a more fruitful research avenue to explain a court’s gatekeeping decisions. Using a new database of civil merits appeals from 2008 to 2022 (N=6,003), we provide novel empirical insights into the forces shaping judicial policymaking at the Norwegian Supreme Court, a European high court with significantly expanded powers to select merits cases for review. Results show that pairing litigants, rather than the relative appellant advantage, better elicits justices’ gatekeeping choices. This paper contributes to research on gatekeeping in European courts and empirically and theoretically expands research beyond the current relative appellant advantage hypothesis.