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Beyond Principal-Agent Theories: Law And The Judicial Hierarchy, Pauline Kim
Beyond Principal-Agent Theories: Law And The Judicial Hierarchy, Pauline Kim
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Essay critically examines the commonplace use by judicial politics scholars of principal-agent models to describe the federal judicial hierarchy. It argues that agency models are useful in highlighting certain aspects of the interaction between upper and lower courts - specifically, the existence of value conflicts and informational asymmetries - but that in other ways traditional principal-agent models fit poorly the relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court. As a consequence, these models tend to obscure important normative questions about the relationship between lower and upper courts, as well as to distort the role that law plays …