Majority opinion

About: Majority opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54845 citations. The topic is also known as: opinion of the court.

What Determines Judicial Prestige? An Empirical Analysis for Judges of the Federal Court of Australia

Abstract: This article examines judicial citations to analyze the determinants of judicial prestige in the Federal Court of Australia. First we construct two alternative measures of judicial prestige for all current and retired judges of the Federal Court. Second, we regress these measures of judicial prestige on a series of explanatory variables covering age on appointment, appointing government, prior experience, which law school the judge attended, how many law review articles the judge has published, gender, and tenure. We compare our results with those of previous studies that examine the determinants of judicial influence and prestige in courts in the United States and the High Court of Australia. One of the main contributions of the article is to provide evidence from an intermediate appellate court that can be used to test the general application of findings as to what determines judicial prestige in the United States to courts in other countries with different institutional frameworks.

Opinion Writing in the Federal District Courts

Abstract: American trial court judges’ roles and behavior vary greatly from their appellate court brethren. One such area of difference has to do with opinion writing behavior, an area where trial judges hold a great deal of discretion in determining whether to write an opinion and, if they do, how long the opinion should be. To examine what factors determine opinion writing behavior among district court judges, this study relies on analyses of an original dataset of civil cases that terminated in eighteen federal district courts from 2000 to 2006. The results indicate that legal, hierarchical, and institutional features are critical in motivating opinion writing and opinion length and that personal factors have very limited effects. The fruits of this exercise have important implications for how we view and model the behavior of trial court judges in the future.