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How Well Do Measures Of Judicial Ability Translate Into Performance?, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Diverse measures are used as proxies for judicial ability, ranging from the college and law school a judge attended to the rate at which her decisions are cited by other judges. Yet there has been little serious examination of which of these ability measures is better or worse at predicting the quality of judicial performance—including the management and disposition of cases. In this article, we attempt to evaluate these measures of ability by examining a rich group of performance indicators. Our innovation is to derive performance measures from judicial decisions other than case outcomes (which are inherently difficult to evaluate): …