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How Well Do Measures Of Judicial Ability Translate Into Performance?, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
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): …
Sonia Sotomayor And The Construction Of Merit, Guy-Uriel Charles, Daniel L. Chen, Mitu Gulati
Sonia Sotomayor And The Construction Of Merit, Guy-Uriel Charles, Daniel L. Chen, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
The appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009 was criticized as sacrificing merit on the altar of identity politics. According to critics, Sotomayor was simply “not that smart”. For some conservative critics, her selection illustrated the costs of affirmative action policies, in that this particular choice was going to produce a lower quality Supreme Court. For liberal critics, many were concerned that the President, by selecting Sotomayor, was squandering an opportunity to appoint an intellectual counterweight to conservative justices like Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Using a set of basic measures of judicial merit, such …
Judging Women, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Mirya Holman, Eric A. Posner
Judging Women, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Mirya Holman, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be “better” than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. We find that the male and female judges perform at about the same level. Roughly similar findings show up in data from the …
Judicial Ability And Securities Class Actions, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Judicial Ability And Securities Class Actions, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
We exploit a new data set of judicial rulings on motions in order to investigate the relationship between judicial ability and judicial outcomes. The data set consists of federal district judges’ rulings on motions to dismiss, to approve the lead plaintiff, and to approve attorneys’ fees in securities class actions cases, and also judges’ decisions to remove themselves from cases. We predict that higher-quality judges, as measured by citations, affirmance rates, and similar criteria, are more likely to dismiss cases, reject lead plaintiffs, reject attorneys’ fees, and retain cases rather than hand them over to other judges. Our results are …
Talking Judges, Mitu Gulati, Jack Knight
Talking Judges, Mitu Gulati, Jack Knight
Faculty Scholarship
What kinds of empirical questions about themselves and their colleagues on the bench are judges interested in asking? This was the topic of a recent conference at the Duke Law School. Our Essay reflects on the ways in which the judges at this conference and at a prior one talked about the empirical study of their community. To put it mildly, most of the judges were not fans of the empirical research. Our interest in this Essay is not, however, in responding to the judicial criticisms. Rather it is in drawing insights about how judges view themselves and their profession …
Evaluating Judges And Judicial Institutions: Reorienting The Perspective, Mitu Gulati, David E. Klein, David F. Levi
Evaluating Judges And Judicial Institutions: Reorienting The Perspective, Mitu Gulati, David E. Klein, David F. Levi
Faculty Scholarship
Empirical scholarship on judges, judging, and judicial institutions, a staple in political science, is becoming increasingly popular in law schools. We propose that this scholarship can be improved and enhanced by greater collaboration between empirical scholars, legal theorists, and the primary subjects of the research, the judges. We recently hosted a workshop that attempted to move away from the conventional mode of involving judges and theorists in empirical research, where they serve as commentators on empirical studies that they often see as reductionist and mis-focused. Instead, we had the judges and theorists set the discussion agenda for the empiricists by …
The Costs Of Judging Judges By The Numbers, Marin K. Levy, Kate Stith, Jose A. Cabranes
The Costs Of Judging Judges By The Numbers, Marin K. Levy, Kate Stith, Jose A. Cabranes
Faculty Scholarship
This essay discredits current empirical models that are designed to “judge” or rank appellate judges, and then assesses the harms of propagating such models. First, the essay builds on the discussion of empirical models by arguing that (1) the judicial virtues that the legal empiricists set out to measure have little bearing on what actually makes for a good judge; and (2) even if they did, the empiricists’ chosen variables have not measured those virtues accurately. The essay then concludes that by generating unreliable claims about the relative quality of judges, these studies mislead both decision-makers and the public, degrade …
Professionals Or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case For An Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Professionals Or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case For An Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom holds that appointed judges are superior to elected judges because appointed judges are less vulnerable to political pressure. However, there is little empirical evidence for this view. Using a data set of state high court opinions,we construct measures for three aspects of judicial performance: effort, skill, and independence. The measures permit a test of the relationship between performance and the four primary methods of state high court judge selection: partisan election, non-partisan election, merit plan, and appointment. Appointed judges write higher quality opinions than elected judges do, but elected judges write more opinions, and the evidence suggests that …
Are Judges Overpaid?: A Skeptical Response To The Judicial Salary Debate, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Are Judges Overpaid?: A Skeptical Response To The Judicial Salary Debate, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
The public debate over the need to raise judicial salaries has been one-sided. Sentiment appears to be that judges are underpaid. But neither theory nor evidence provides much support for this view. The primary argument being made in favor of a pay increase is that it will raise the quality of judging. Theory suggests that increasing judicial salaries will improve judicial performance only if judges can be sanctioned for performing inadequately or if the appointments process reliably screens out low-ability candidates. However, federal judges and many state judges cannot be sanctioned, and the reliability of screening processes is open to …
Which States Have The Best (And Worst) High Courts?, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Which States Have The Best (And Worst) High Courts?, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
This paper ranks the high courts of the fifty states, based on their performance during the years 1998-2000, along three dimensions: opinion quality (or influence as measured by out-of-state citations), independence (or non-partisanship), and productivity (opinions written). We also discuss ways of aggregating these measures. California and Delaware had the most influential courts; Georgia and Mississippi had the most productive courts; and Rhode Island and New York had the most independent courts. If equal weight is given to each measure, then the top five states were: California, Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana, and Ohio. We compare our approach and results with …
Judging Measures, Mitu Gulati, David F. Levi
Judging Measures, Mitu Gulati, David F. Levi
Faculty Scholarship
The question of how to optimally design judicial institutions is one of central importance to the scholarship focused on courts. Basic questions such as whether there should be mandatory retirement for judges, whether judges should be expected to write their own opinions and whether greater racial or gender diversity on the courts improves decision making are optimal design questions. Given the vast variation in the types of judicial system designs used around the world (and even within the United States), it should be possible to conduct a comparative analysis of the relative efficacy of the different designs. These comparisons cannot …