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."
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