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Law, Fact, And Discretion In The Federal Courts: An Empirical Study, Robert Anderson Dec 2011

Law, Fact, And Discretion In The Federal Courts: An Empirical Study, Robert Anderson

Robert Anderson IV

The organization of the federal judiciary rests upon a division of labor between trial courts and appellate courts. Central to this division of labor is the standard of review, which requires that appellate courts review factual and discretionary decisions deferentially. The conventional wisdom is that appellate courts almost never reverse trial court findings of fact and rarely reverse discretionary decisions. The prevailing view, however, is greatly oversimplified. Data from federal cases suggest that standards of review operate in a much more complex and nuanced way than the conventional account would indicate. The empirical evidence suggests that the appellate courts routinely …


Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking Of Judicial Quality In The United States Court Of Appeals, Robert Anderson Dec 2006

Distinguishing Judges: An Empirical Ranking Of Judicial Quality In The United States Court Of Appeals, Robert Anderson

Robert Anderson IV

This article presents an empirical quality ranking of 383 federal appellate judges who served on the United States Court of Appeals between 1960 and 2008. Like existing judge evaluation studies, this article uses citations among judicial opinions to assess judicial quality. Unlike existing citation studies, which treat positive and negative citations alike, this article ranks judges according to the mix of positive and negative citations to the opinions, rather than the number of citations to those opinions. By distinguishing between positive and negative citations, this approach avoids ranking judges higher for citations even when the judges are being cited negatively. …