Quantitative Analysis Of Judicial Behavior

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.

The past decade has witnessed a worldwide explosion of work aimed at illuminating judicial-behavior: the choices judges make and the consequences of their choices. We focus on strategic accounts of judicial-behavior. As in other approaches to judging, preferences and institutions play a central role but strategic accounts are unique in one important respect: They draw attention to the interdependent - i.e., the strategic - nature of judicial decisions. On strategic accounts, judges do not make decisions in a vacuum, but rather attend to the preferences and likely actions of other actors, including their colleagues, superiors, politicians, and the public. We survey the major methodological approaches for conducting strategic analysis and consider how scholars have used them to provide insight into the effect of internal and external actors on the judges' choices. As far as these studies have traveled in illuminating judicial-behavior, many opportunities for forward movement remain. We flag four in the conclusion.

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.

From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fates of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed and debated explanations of judicial behavior. This book examines the major issues in the debates over how best to understand judicial behavior and assesses what we actually know about how judges decide cases. It concludes that we are far from understanding why judges choose the positions they take in court. Lawrence Baum considers three issues in examining judicial behavior. First, the author considers the balance between the judges' interest in the outcome of particular cases and their interest in other goals such as personal popularity and lighter workloads. Second, Baum considers the relative importance of good law and good policy as bases for judges' choices. Finally Baum looks at the extent to which judges act strategically, choosing their own positions after taking into account the positions that their fellow judges and other policy makers might adopt. Baum argues that the evidence on each of these issues is inconclusive and that there remains considerable room for debate about the sources of judges' decisions. Baum concludes that this lack of resolution is not the result of weaknesses in the scholarship but from the difficulty in explaining human behavior. He makes a plea for diversity in research. This book will be of interest to political scientists and scholars in law and courts as well as attorneys who are interested in understanding judges as decision makers and who want to understand what we can learn from scholarly research about judicial behavior. Lawrence Baum is Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University.

DIVExamines the contributions of the "pioneers" of research into judicial behavior /div

Judicial Behavior and Policymaking introduces students to the politics of judging, exploring why judges make the decisions they do, who has the power to influence judicial decision-making, and what the consequences of court decisions are for policymaking. Further, this text familiarizes students with the methods that professional political scientists use to conduct research about the courts, including the quantitative analysis of data. Designed for undergraduates and graduate students alike, this accessible and engaging text provides a thorough introduction to the world of judicial politics.