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Journal ArticleDOI

The Role of Competence in Promotions from the Lower Federal Courts

Stephen J. Choi, +2 more
- 26 Sep 2015 - 
- Vol. 44, Iss: 2, pp 6
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TLDR
This paper found that presidents do not take much account of competence when promoting judges, despite the fact that there is some, albeit mixed, evidence that the most competent appellate judges were highly competent district judges.
Abstract
The judicial behavior literature typically assumes that politicians nominate judges on the basis of their ideology. That assumption helps explain studies that show a statistical correlation between the party of the nominating president and the ideological direction of the votes of judges. However, the assumption is too simple. Casual empiricism suggests that politicians, interest groups, and the public care not only about the ideology of judges. They may also care about their competence and political loyalty and about ensuring that the judicial system is diverse. We focus on the role of competence in judicial promotions. We find, however, that presidents do not take much account of competence when promoting judges—despite the fact that there is some, albeit mixed, evidence that the most competent appellate judges were highly competent district judges.

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Citations
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Judge political affiliation and impacts of corporate environmental litigation

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Do Attorney Surveys Measure Judicial Performance or Respondent Ideology? Evidence from Online Evaluations

TL;DR: For example, the authors found that criminal defense attorneys, a group likely to hold progressive views, make up a disproportionate share of the respondents, and respondents assign lower average scores to Republican appointees, especially female and minority ones, even after controlling for the judges' backgrounds and performance measures.
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Crafting the Law: How Opinion Content Influences Legal Development

TL;DR: In this article, the authors theorize that opinions that can be understood efficiently are discussed, expanded, and contracted more frequently than opinions that remain obscure and obscure. But they do not explain why some opinions are widely discussed while others remain obscure.
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Crafting the Law: How Opinion Content Influences Legal Development

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the effect of an opinion's readability, the number of footnotes it contains, its use of precedent, and whether it contains a dissenting opinion on its number of times each year the opinion is cited and its vitality in the United States Supreme Court, the precedent's own court, the exception's sister courts, the precedence's directly subordinate courts, and all remaining state and federal courts.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Measuring Issue Salience

TL;DR: The authors proposed an alternative approach to measure issue saliency for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue, which is a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an issue as salient or not.
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TL;DR: The authors studied the structure of American corporate law, which combines economic analysis with empirical insights to produce a number of policy insights, and was suitable for anyone studying corporate law or federalism.
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Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments

TL;DR: In this paper, two leading legal scholars, Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, offer a brief, illuminating Baedeker to this highly important procedure, discussing everything from constitutional background, to crucial differences in the nomination of judges and justices, to the role of the Judiciary Committee in vetting nominees.
Posted Content

The Genius of American Corporate Law

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the structure of the corporate charter market, the impact of takeover regulation and federal securities law, and the spreading of criminalization of corporate duties in the US.
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What Do Federal District Judges Want? An Analysis of Publications, Citations, and Reversals

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report evidence from a dataset of federal district judges from 2001 to 2002 that district judges adjust their opinion-writing practices to minimize their workload while maximizing their reputation and chance for elevation to a higher court.
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