Case Selection and the Study of Judicial Politics (original) (raw)
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Judicial Ideology and the Selection of Disputes for U.S. Supreme Court Adjudication
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2013
In political science, the well-known "attitudinal model" of legal decision making dictates that judges' sincere policy preferences drive legal outcomes. In contrast, the celebrated "selection hypothesis" from the law and economics literature suggests that litigants carefully consider factors affecting potential case success (including judicial ideology) and accordingly choose, in the name of efficiency, to settle or not pursue cases in which legal outcomes can be readily predicted. Thus, judges end up adjudicating a nonrandom set of cases that, in the typical situation, should not lend themselves to ideological judicial decision making. From this perspective, the influence of Supreme Court justices' ideological preferences on outcomes could be obviated by the forward-thinking decisions of mindful litigants. We are left with two dominant theories on jurisprudential outcomes that appear to be at odds with each other. We endeavor to address this situation by incorporating litigation case sorting considerations into a basic attitudinal account of Supreme Court justice decision making in environmental cases. Our primary thesis is that the influence of judicial ideology on legal outcomes is conditioned on case sorting decisions (by both litigants and justices) that precede the justices' voting decisions on the merits. We augment our assessment of this thesis by evaluating our basic model on a subset of cases involving the Court's most formidable litigator-the federal government. We find that in both scenarios, the influence of justices' attitudes on their merits voting is indeed conditioned on case sorting. We conclude that the effect of justices' attitudes on Supreme Court policy making likely works in both direct and indirect ways in that their known ideological proclivities may lead to the strategic sorting of cases for Supreme Court adjudication.
Strategy in Supreme Court Case Selection: The Relationship Between Certiorari and the Merits
2008
In this Article the authors examine how the Supreme Court exercises its virtually unfettered control over case selection. With its certiorari power, the Court sets its direction and influences the country's social agenda, yet relatively little is known about how the Justices choose cases because of the intense secrecy that envelops this aspect of their work. Using data from the private papers of retired Justices, the authors analyze whether, and to what extent, the Justices cast their votes to grant or deny cases based on whether they expect to win on the merits. More specifically, the authors analyze whether Justices who are ideologically aligned on the merits also tend to vote together at the case selection stage and, similarly, whether Justices who are ideologically opposed on the merits also tend to cast opposing votes at the case selection stage. In addition, the authors look more closely at the Justices' voting behavior from the certiorari stage through the merits stag...
The Consistency of Judicial Choice
The Journal of Politics, 2008
Despite the fact that judicial scholars have developed reasonably well-specified models of the voting behavior of U.S. Supreme Court justices, little attention has been paid to influences on the consistency of the choices justices make. Aside from the methodological problems associated with failure to account for heteroskedasticity with regard to the justices' voting behavior, I argue that variance in judicial choice is also of theoretical import. Simply put, by uncovering influences on the stability of judicial choice, a more complete understanding of judicial decision making is provided. I explore this possibility by developing a theoretical framework that uncovers influences on the consistency of judicial choice which are then subjected to empirical validation. I show that the stability of judicial decision making is affected by attitudinal and strategic factors, as well as the Court's informational environment.
Does Judicial Selection Affect Judicial Performance? Evidence from a Natural Experiment
The Forum, 2020
Do judges selected by merit review commissions perform better than elected judges or those directly appointed by elected officials? This is a central question in both the academic study of state judicial institutions and the policy discourse about how to reform them. To address it, we take advantage of the variation in the means of the selection for trial court judges within Arizona, a state comprised of appointed, elected, and merit-selected trial court judges. This unique context allows us to use an objective measure of judicial performance – the reversal rate of trial court cases appealed to Arizona’s state appellate courts – to evaluate judges by their means of selection. We gather an original dataset on 2919 cases heard by 176 judges, estimating multivariate models that control for characteristics of cases and of judges. Overall, we find that elected judges have a lower reversal rate than merit-selected judges. Our findings question the conventional wisdom in the state courts l...
Rational Judicial Behavior: A Statistical Study
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
This paper analyzes the connection between ideology and voting of judges using a large sample of court of appeals cases decided since 1925 and Supreme Court cases decided since 1937. The ideological classifications of votes (e.g., liberal or conservative) are dependent variables in our empirical analysis and the independent variables include the party of the appointing President, the relative number of Republican and Democratic Senators at the time of the judge's confirmation, the appointment year, characteristics of the judge (e.g., gender, race and prior experience), and the ideological make-up of the judges on the court in which the judge sits as measured by the relative number of judges appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents. We have a number of interesting results, including how a judge's voting's is affected by the voting of the other judges he serves with. We find a political-polarization effect among Justices appointed by Democratic but not by Republican Presidents; that is, the fewer the judges appointed by Democratic Presidents, the more liberally they vote. With regard to court of appeals judges, we find a conformity effect: if the number of judges appointed by Republican Presidents increases (decreases) relative to the number appointed by Democratic Presidents, all judges in the circuit tend to vote more conservatively (more liberally).
Case Selection in Three Supreme Courts: A Comparative Perspective
2007
This paper brings a comparative perspective to an important procedural issue faced in many judicial systems. It examines the exercise of the power of case selection in three supreme courts that have each been given some degree of control over whether to accept particular ...
The Journal of Politics, 2013
Court scholars have a voracious appetite for Supreme Court preference measures. Several papers question whether widely-used Martin and Quinn scores provide valid intertemporal measures, calling into question virtually an entire generation of quantitative research on the Court. This paper discusses the challenges of inter-temporal preference estimation and revises, updates and extends Bailey and Maltzman (2011) to present Supreme Court preference estimates that are more defensibly comparable across time and institutions.