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Judges, Lawyers, And A Predictive Theory Of Legal Complexity, Benjamin H. Barton
Judges, Lawyers, And A Predictive Theory Of Legal Complexity, Benjamin H. Barton
College of Law Faculty Scholarship
This Article uses public choice theory and the new institutionalism to discuss the incentives, proclivities, and shared backgrounds of lawyers and judges. In America every law-making judge has a single unifying characteristic; each is a former lawyer. This shared background has powerful and unexplored effects on the shape and structure of American law. This Article argues that the common interests, thought-processes, training, and incentives of Judges and lawyers lead inexorably to greater complexity in judge-made law. These same factors lead to the following prediction: judge-created law will be most complex in areas where a) elite lawyers regularly practice; b) judges …
Forum, Federalism, And Free Markets: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Behavior Under The Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine, Mehmet K. Konar-Steenberg, Anne F. Peterson
Forum, Federalism, And Free Markets: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Behavior Under The Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine, Mehmet K. Konar-Steenberg, Anne F. Peterson
Faculty Scholarship
This study examines judicial behavior under the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine by drawing on an original database of 459 state and Federal appellate cases decided between 1970 and 2009. The authors use logit regression to show that state judges are more likely to uphold state and local laws against dormant Commerce Clause attack than their Federal judicial counterparts, a result that is consistent with the interstate rivalry issues animating the doctrine. The study also finds that Republican-dominated judicial panels at the state level are more likely to side with tax challengers invoking the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine than are Democratic …
Left, Right, And Center: Strategic Information Acquisition And Diversity In Judicial Panels, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Left, Right, And Center: Strategic Information Acquisition And Diversity In Judicial Panels, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
This paper develops and analyzes a hierarchical model of judicial review in multimember appellate courts. In our model, judicial panels acquire information endogenously, through the efforts of individual panelists, acting strategically. The resulting equilibria strongly resemble the empirical phenomena collectively known as "panel effects" – and in particular the observed regularity with which ideological diversity on a panel predicts greater moderation in voting behavior (even after controlling for the median voter's preferences). In our model, non-pivotal panel members with ideologies far from the median have the greatest incentive to acquire additional policy-relevant information where no one on a unified panel …