This excellent research review contains the very best studies that take an economic approach to the study of judicial behaviour. The authors hail from the disciplines of business, economics, history, law, and political science, and the topics they cover are equally varied. Subjects include the judges' motivations, judicial independence, precedent, judging on collegial courts and in the hierarchy of justice and the relationship between judges and the other government actors.

The past decade has witnessed a worldwide explosion of work aimed at illuminating judicial-behavior: the choices judges make and the consequences of their choices. We focus on strategic accounts of judicial-behavior. As in other approaches to judging, preferences and institutions play a central role but strategic accounts are unique in one important respect: They draw attention to the interdependent - i.e., the strategic - nature of judicial decisions. On strategic accounts, judges do not make decisions in a vacuum, but rather attend to the preferences and likely actions of other actors, including their colleagues, superiors, politicians, and the public. We survey the major methodological approaches for conducting strategic analysis and consider how scholars have used them to provide insight into the effect of internal and external actors on the judges' choices. As far as these studies have traveled in illuminating judicial-behavior, many opportunities for forward movement remain. We flag four in the conclusion.

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."

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In litigation judges are confronted with empirical evidence in cases ranging from bankruptcy and taxation to criminal law and environmental infringement. In academia researchers are increasingly turning to sophisticated empirical methods to assess and challenge fundamental assumptions about the law.
As empirical methods impact on traditional legal scholarship and practice, new forms of education are needed for today's lawyers. All lawyers asked to present or assess empirical arguments need to understand the fundamental principles of social science methodology that underpin sound empirical research. An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research introduces that methodology in a legal context, explaining how empirical analysis can inform legal arguments; how lawyers can set about framing empirical questions, conducting empirical research, analyzing data, and presenting or evaluating the results. The fundamentals of understanding quantitative and qualitative data, statistical models, and the structure of empirical arguments are explained in a way accessible to lawyers with or without formal training in statistics.
Written by two of the world's leading experts in empirical legal analysis, drawing on years of experience in training lawyers in empirical methods, An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research will be an invaluable primer for all students, academics, or practicing lawyers coming to empirical research - whether they are embarking themselves on an empirical research project, or engaging with empirical arguments in their field of study, research, or practice.

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In litigation judges are confronted with empirical evidence in cases ranging from bankruptcy and taxation to criminal law and environmental infringement. In academia researchers are increasingly turning to sophisticated empirical methods to assess and challenge fundamental assumptions about the law.
As empirical methods impact on traditional legal scholarship and practice, new forms of education are needed for today's lawyers. All lawyers asked to present or assess empirical arguments need to understand the fundamental principles of social science methodology that underpin sound empirical research. An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research introduces that methodology in a legal context, explaining how empirical analysis can inform legal arguments; how lawyers can set about framing empirical questions, conducting empirical research, analyzing data, and presenting or evaluating the results. The fundamentals of understanding quantitative and qualitative data, statistical models, and the structure of empirical arguments are explained in a way accessible to lawyers with or without formal training in statistics.
Written by two of the world's leading experts in empirical legal analysis, drawing on years of experience in training lawyers in empirical methods, An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research will be an invaluable primer for all students, academics, or practicing lawyers coming to empirical research - whether they are embarking themselves on an empirical research project, or engaging with empirical arguments in their field of study, research, or practice.

Public Interest Law Groups focuses on a special segment of the profession, namely groups `that provide cost-free legal care to willing clients' including `legal aid and legal services groups, interest groups that litigate, and public-interest law firms.' . . . It ought to be an automatic purchase for law school libraries and it will fulfull needs for information about these organizations in large public and academic libraries. Wilson Library Bulletin In recent years, public interest law has shifted from an exclusive interest in the expansion of rights in such areas as consumer protection, environmental law, and discrimination to a parallel concern with seeking limits to freedoms and rights in both the public and private sector. In addition, public interest law firms have introduced diversified litigation strategies that were uncommon even a decade ago. This volume is the only comprehensive work to reflect these recent changes in the complexion and strategies of public interest litigation. Following an introduction describing the major shifts that have occurred in public advocacy, the authors present over 300 profiles of firms, groups, and organizations that litigate in behalf of the public interest and/or use the courts to achieve policy ends. Organizations surveyed include groups that focus on the protection of special interests, rights, or resources and those that offer legal aid in diverse areas, as well as legal organizations such as the American Bar Association. Among the areas of concern are the advancement of science in the public interest, conservation, consumer interests, abortion, constitutional and civil rights, and the rights of groups ranging from the elderly, women, children, and the handicapped to American Indians and other minorities. Additional groups and significant public interest cases are listed at the end of the book. An important source of information for those wishing more data on a particular group or the scope of today's public interest litigation, this book is recommended for legal, public, and academic library reference collections.

Scores of works have made important contributions to the study of courts and judges but far fewer are sufficiently powerful to alter perspectives about entire areas of study. The articles in this volume do just that. They are, to be sure, a rather diverse set covering four substantive concerns - judicial selection and retention, judicial decision making, constraints on judicial power and the role of courts in democracies - but all have played crucial roles in shaping or changing the way we think about courts and judges.