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The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice
07 Jan 2013-
TL;DR: In this paper, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge worked together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making, using statistical methods to test hypotheses, and they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.
Abstract: 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 their 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.
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TL;DR: This work investigates how natural language processing tools can be used to analyse texts of the court proceedings in order to automatically predict (future) judicial decisions, and demonstrates that it can achieve a relatively high classification performance when predicting outcomes based only on the surnames of the judges that try the case.
Abstract: When courts started publishing judgements, big data analysis (i.e. large-scale statistical analysis of case law and machine learning) within the legal domain became possible. By taking data from the European Court of Human Rights as an example, we investigate how natural language processing tools can be used to analyse texts of the court proceedings in order to automatically predict (future) judicial decisions. With an average accuracy of 75% in predicting the violation of 9 articles of the European Convention on Human Rights our (relatively simple) approach highlights the potential of machine learning approaches in the legal domain. We show, however, that predicting decisions for future cases based on the cases from the past negatively impacts performance (average accuracy range from 58 to 68%). Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can achieve a relatively high classification performance (average accuracy of 65%) when predicting outcomes based only on the surnames of the judges that try the case.
171 citations
Cites background from "The Behavior of Federal Judges: A T..."
...A growing body of research presents the results of citation analysis of case law of courts in the USA (see Whalen 2016; Matthews 2017; Shulayeva et al....
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...Most of these papers focus on case law from the USA (see Chien 2011; Epstein et al. 2013), but researchers outside of the USA have conducted such analyses as well (Holá et al....
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...2013), but researchers outside of the USA have conducted such analyses as well (Holá et al....
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...A large number of studies (especially outside the USA) present basic descriptive statistics of manually collected and coded case law (e.g., Bruinsma and De Blois 1997; White and Boussiakou 2009; De Jaeger 2017; Madsen 2018; Vols and Jacobs 2017)....
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...Most of these papers focus on case law from the USA (see Chien 2011; Epstein et al....
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TL;DR: The authors showed that the effect of de facto judicial independence depends on the institutional environment, but not on a country's initial per capita income, while de facto JI is highly significantly and robustly correlated with economic growth.
Abstract: Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively measuring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper presents more recent data on de jure and de facto judicial independence (JI) and strongly confirms previous results that de jure JI is not systematically related to economic growth, but de facto JI is highly significantly and robustly correlated with growth. In addition, we show that the effect of de facto JI depends on the institutional environment, but not on a country’s initial per capita income.
90 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take stock of how party polarization affects governance in the United States and discuss the means by which it can be measured, and conclude that there is little evidence that party polarization has promoted ideologically extreme policy outcomes or has systematically advantaged eithe...
Abstract: The purpose of this review is to take stock of how party polarization affects governance in the United States. The article begins by defining polarization and discussing the means by which it can be measured. It is undeniable that the two parties have grown more sharply differentiated. Some evidence suggests that the substantive policy preferences of liberals and conservatives diverge more widely, but the case for ideological polarization in the spatial sense is not definitive. Effects on the institutional processes of US government have entailed a hardening of party divisions and a tendency toward centralization of power. Nevertheless, these more cohesive parties are not more effective than their predecessors at enacting policies or managing routine governing responsibilities. The consequences for public policy seem best characterized as “drift” (Hacker 2004, p. 246). There is little evidence that party polarization has promoted ideologically extreme policy outcomes or has systematically advantaged eithe...
81 citations
Cites background from "The Behavior of Federal Judges: A T..."
...The depth of the judicial party divide varies across issues, and partisan division is starkest on civil rights cases (Epstein et al. 2013)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented more recent objective data on de jure and de facto judicial independence and strongly confirmed previous results that de facto JI is not systematically related to economic growth.
79 citations
TL;DR: This paper investigated whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge, and found that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar non-blacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months.
Abstract: This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar non-blacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap and 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap, respectively. These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.
76 citations
Cites background from "The Behavior of Federal Judges: A T..."
...2See, e.g., Sunstein et al. (2006) and Epstein et al. (2013) for overviews of the literature, and a literature examining judge characteristics at the appellate level (e.g., Cox and Miles 2008, Chew and Kelley 2008) and trial court level (e.g., Schanzenbach and Tiller 2007, Tiede et al. 2010,…...
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...…have found that in the context of federal district courts, the party of the appointing president is substantially correlated with other ideological proxies, such as the judge’s own political affiliation or the political affiliation of same-party senators (see Epstein, Landes, and Posner 2013)....
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