Judicial Behavior

Interest in social science and empirical analyses of law, courts and specifically the politics of judges has never been higher or more salient. Consequently, there is a strong need for theoretical work on the research that focuses on courts, judges and the judicial process. The Routledge Handbook of Judicial Behavior provides the most up to date examination of scholarship across the entire spectrum of judicial politics and behavior, written by a combination of currently prominent scholars and the emergent next generation of researchers. Unlike almost all other volumes, this Handbook examines judicial behavior from both an American and Comparative perspective. Part 1 provides a broad overview of the dominant Theoretical and Methodological perspectives used to examine and understand judicial behavior, Part 2 offers an in-depth analysis of the various current scholarly areas examining the U.S. Supreme Court, Part 3 moves from the Supreme Court to examining other U.S. federal and state courts, and Part 4 presents a comprehensive overview of Comparative Judicial Politics and Transnational Courts. Each author in this volume provides perspectives on the most current methodological and substantive approaches in their respective areas, along with suggestions for future research. The chapters contained within will generate additional scholarly and public interest by focusing on topics most salient to the academic, legal and policy communities.

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

"[This book offers] an introduction and analysis of research regarding decision making by judges serving on federal and state courts in the U.S...[This handbook] describes and explains how the courts' political and social context, formal institutional structures, and informal norms affect judicial decision making. The Handbook also explores the impact of judges' personal attributes and preferences, as well as prevailing legal doctrine, influence, and shape case outcomes in state and federal courts. The volume also proposes avenues for future research in the various topics addressed throughout the book."--

DIVHow do we explain judges' decisions? /div

Two leading scholars of the Supreme Court explain and predict its decision making.

In The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior, prominent political scientists critically examine the contributions to the field of public law of the pioneering scholars of judicial behavior: C. Hermann Pritchett, Glendon Schubert, S. Sidney Ulmer, Harold J. Spaeth, Joseph Tanenhaus, Beverly Blair Cook, Walter F. Murphy, J. Woodward Howard, David J. Danelski, David Rohde, Edward S. Corwin, Alpheus Thomas Mason, Robert G. McCloskey, Robert A. Dahl, and Martin Shapiro. Unlike past studies that have traced the emergence and growth of the field of judicial studies, The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior accounts for the emergence and exploration of three current theoretical approaches to the study of judicial behavior--attitudinal, strategic, and historical-institutionalist--and shows how the research of these foundational scholars has contributed to contemporary debates about how to conceptualize judges as policy makers. Chapters utilize correspondence of and interviews with some early scholars, and provide a format to connect the concerns and controversies of the first political scientists of law and courts to contemporary challenges and methodological debates among today's judicial scholars. The volume's purpose in looking back is to look forward: to contribute to an ecumenical research agenda on judicial decision making, and, ultimately, to the generation of a unified, general theory of judicial behavior. The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior will be of interest to graduate students in the law and courts field, political scientists interested in the philosophy of social science and the history of the discipline, legal practitioners and researchers, and political commentators interested in academic theorizing about public policy making. Nancy L. Maveety is Associate Professor of Political Science, Tulane University.

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges' social peers. Engagingly written, this book provides a deeper understanding of key issues concerning judicial behavior on which scholars disagree, identifies aspects of judicial behavior that diverge from the assumptions of existing models, and shows how those models can be strengthened.