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'"Ideology" Or "Situation Sense"? An Experimental Investigation Of Motivated Reasoning And Professional Judgment, Dan M. Kahan, David Hoffman, Danieli Evans, Neal Devins, Eugene Lucci, Katherine Cheng Sep 2019

'"Ideology" Or "Situation Sense"? An Experimental Investigation Of Motivated Reasoning And Professional Judgment, Dan M. Kahan, David Hoffman, Danieli Evans, Neal Devins, Eugene Lucci, Katherine Cheng

Neal E. Devins

This Article reports the results of a study on whether political predispositions influence judicial decisionmaking. The study was designed to overcome the two principal limitations on existing empirical studies that purport to find such an influence: the use of nonexperimental methods to assess the decisions of actual judges; and the failure to use actual judges in ideologically-biased-reasoning experiments. The study involved a sample of sitting judges (n = 253), who, like members of a general public sample (n = 800), were culturally polarized on climate change, marijuana legalization and other contested issues. When the study subjects were assigned to analyze …


Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2019

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as …