The Behavior of Federal Judges

Brief Introduction

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 secretive, 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 that considers judges to be self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. 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 diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to courts of appeals to district courts. 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 full introduction to the text is available here.
The supporting datasets may be found here.

Where to Obtain

The book is available from the following booksellers:
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Harvard University Press