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Misjudging, Chris Guthrie
Misjudging, Chris Guthrie
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Judging is difficult. This is obviously so in cases where the law is unclear or the facts are uncertain. But even in those cases where the law is as clear as it can be, and where the relevant facts have been fully developed, judges might still have difficulty getting it right. Why do judges misjudge? Judges, I will argue, possess three sets of "blinders": informational blinders, cognitive blinders, and attitudinal blinders. These blinders make adjudication on the merits - by which I mean the accurate application of governing law to the facts of the case - difficult. This difficulty, in …
Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich
Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
How do judges judge? Do they apply law to facts in a mechanical and deliberative way, as the formalists suggest they do, or do they rely on hunches and gut feelings, as the realists maintain? Debate has raged for decades, but researchers have offered little hard evidence in support of either model. Relying on empirical studies of judicial reasoning and decision making, we propose an entirely new model of judging that provides a more accurate explanation of judicial behavior. Our model accounts for the tendency of the human brain to make automatic, snap judgments, which are surprisingly accurate, but which …
The Most Dangerous Justice Rides Into The Sunset, Paul H. Edelman, Jim Chen
The Most Dangerous Justice Rides Into The Sunset, Paul H. Edelman, Jim Chen
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In this essay, our third and last in a series, we employ our previously developed techniques to measure the power of the Justices in the Rehnquist Court over its full 11 year run. Once again, Justice Kennedy rises to the top of our rankings, as he had done earlier. Our methods identify Justices Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg as being notable either for their influence or lack thereof. In addition, we rejoin the debate on the connection between being the median justice and being the most powerful one. We question whether even the most sophisticated methods of finding the median justice …