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Full-Text Articles in Judges
What’S Age Got To Do With It? Supreme Court Appointees And The Long Run Location Of The Supreme Court Median Justice, Matthew L. Spitzer
What’S Age Got To Do With It? Supreme Court Appointees And The Long Run Location Of The Supreme Court Median Justice, Matthew L. Spitzer
Matthew L Spitzer
For approximately the past 40 years Republican Presidents have appointed younger Justices than have Democratic Presidents. Depending on how one does the accounting, the average age difference will vary, but will not go away. This Article posits that Republicans appointing younger justices than Democrats may have caused a rightward shift in the Supreme Court. We use computer simulations to show that if the trend continues the rightward shift will likely increase. We also to produce some very rough estimates of the size of the ideological shift, contingent on the size of the age differential. In addition, we show that the …
The Limits Of Debate Or What We Talk About When We Talk About Gender Imbalance On The Bench, Keith Bybee
The Limits Of Debate Or What We Talk About When We Talk About Gender Imbalance On The Bench, Keith Bybee
Keith J. Bybee
What do we talk about when we talk about gender imbalance on the bench? The first thing we do is keep track of the number of female judges. Once the data has been gathered, we then argue about what the disparity between men and women in the judiciary means. These arguments about meaning are not freestanding. On the contrary, I claim that debates over gender imbalance occur within the context of a broader public debate over the nature of judicial decisionmaking. I argue that this public debate revolves around dueling conceptions of the judge as impartial arbiter and as politically …
Judicial Attention As A Scarce Resource: A Preliminary Defense Of How Judges Allocate Time Across Cases In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy
Faculty Scholarship
Federal appellate judges no longer have the time to hear argument and draft opinions in all of their cases. The average annual filing per active judgeship now stands at 330 filed cases per year — more than four times what it was sixty years ago. In response, judges have adopted case management strategies that effectively involve spending significantly less time on certain classes of cases than on others. Various scholars have decried this state of affairs, suggesting that the courts have created a “bifurcated” system of justice with “separate and unequal tracks.” These reformers propose altering the relevant constraints of …
Rethinking The Principal-Agent Theory Of Judging, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash
Rethinking The Principal-Agent Theory Of Judging, Rafael I. Pardo, Jonathan Remy Nash
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Essay offers new insights into understanding the relationship between higher and lower courts and responds to the extant literature that has characterized the relationship as one involving a principal and an agent. We challenge the underpinnings of the principal-agent understanding of judicial hierarchies and identify problems with the theory’s applicability in this context. While principals ordinarily select their agents, higher court judges usually do not select lower court judges. Moreover, while lower court judges may cast votes with an eye to the possibility of elevation to a higher court, the higher court judges who review the lower court’s decisions …
Managerial Judging And Substantive Law, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Managerial Judging And Substantive Law, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
The figure of the proactive jurist, involved in case management from the outset of the litigation and attentive throughout the proceedings to the impact of her decisions on settlement dynamics -- a managerial judge -- has displaced the passive umpire as the dominant paradigm in the federal district courts. Thus far, discussions of managerial judging have focused primarily upon values endogenous to the practice of judging. Procedural scholarship has paid little attention to the impact of the underlying substantive law on the parameters and conduct of complex proceedings.
In this Article, I examine the interface between substantive law and managerial …