Judges Commons^™

What's Left Of Solidarity? Reflections On Law, Race, And Labor History, Martha R. Mahoney

Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Holes, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the years that followed the events of September 11, 2001, a debate crystallized between those who think that “legal grey and black holes”—which I call simply “legal holes”—are necessary and integral to U.S. law and those who think that they are dangerous and should be abolished. Legal black holes “arise when statutes or legal rules ‘either explicitly exempt[] the executive from the requirements of the rule of law or explicitly exclude[] judicial review of executive action.’” Grey holes, in contrast, “arise when ‘there are some legal constraints on executive action . . . but the[y] are so insubstantial …

Reluctant Judicial Factfinding: When Minimalism And Judicial Modesty Go Too Far, Scott A. Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.

Judging The Judges, Stefanie A. Lindquist, Frank B. Cross

Scholarship@WashULaw

The evaluation of judges, especially circuit court judges, has commanded increased attention, with the quantitative analyses of Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati. However, the proper dimensions for the evaluation of judges remains much disputed. Critics have challenged Choi & Gulati’s scales for measuring judicial quality but have offered little that is positive that would improve measurement. The critics make philosophical challenges to whether the measures truly capture the qualities of judging we should desire, but they offer no measurement tools to improve on Choi and Gulati.

We hope to advance the theoretical and empirical evaluation by incorporating different scales for …

A Review Of “How Judges Think” By Richard A Posner, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

This is a short review of How Judges Think by Richard Posner.

Judicial Independence, Harry Tepker

Other Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Chief William's Ghost: The Problematic Persistence Of The Duty To Sit Doctrine, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The duty to sit concept or “doctrine”—or at least what I term the “pernicious” version of the concept—emphasizes a judge's obligation to hear and decide cases unless there is a compelling ground for disqualification and creates a situation in which judges are erroneously pushed to resolve close disqualification issues against recusal when the presumption should run in exactly the opposite direction. In close cases, judges should err on the side of recusal in order to enhance public confidence in the judiciary and to ensure that subtle, subconscious, or hard-to-prove bias, prejudice, or partiality does not influence decision-making. The pernicious version …

Judges Judging Judicial Candidates: Should Currently Serving Judges Participate In Commissions To Screen And Recommend Article Iii Candidates Below The Supreme Court Level?, Mary Clark

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, the American Bar Association (ABA), among others, called upon the next president to reform the federal judicial selection process by using bipartisan commissions to screen and recommend Article III candidates for presidential nomination and Senate confirmation below the Supreme Court level. This proposal may well find support in the Obama administration, given the new president’s emphasis on bipartisan consensus-building and transparency of government operations. This Article addresses one question that the ABA and others have not: Should currently serving judges participate in bi-partisan commissions to screen and recommend Article III candidates below …

Human Rights Hero - Sandra Day O'Connor, Stephen Wermiel, Michael S. Greco

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Some Thoughts On Judicial Review And Collaborative Governance, Michael Herz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Prologue To District Of Columbia Democracy And The Third Branch Of Government, John W. Nields, Timothy J. May

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Why does the President of the United States appoint the judges of the District of Columbia's local court system? Why is the District of Columbia's local court system funded and overseen by the United States Congress? Why does the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and not the Attorney General for the District of Columbia function as a local prosecutor, prosecuting most D.C. Code crimes in the District of Columbia's courts? The four essays which follow this introduction explore the rich history behind these unusual structural features of the District of Columbia government; they present the arguments for …

The Myth Of The Generalist Judge, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Conventional judicial wisdom assumes and indeed celebrates the ideal of the generalist judge, but do judges really believe in it? This Article empirically tests this question by examining opinion assignments in the federal courts of appeals from 1995-2005. It reveals that opinion specialization is a regular part of circuit court practice, and that a significant number of judges specialize in specific subject areas. The Article then assesses the desirability of opinion specialization. Far from being a mere loophole, opinion specialization turns out to be an important development in judicial practice that promises to increase judicial expertise without incurring many of …

Reconsidering Virginia Judicial Selection, Carl W. Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal …

“Militant Judgement?: Judicial Ontology, Constitutional Poetics, And ‘The Long War’”, Penelope J. Pether

Working Paper Series

This Article, a contribution to the Cardozo Law Review symposium in honor of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, uses Badiou’s theorizing of the event and of the militant in Being and Event as a basis for an exploration of problems of judicial ontology and constitutional hermeneutics raised in recent decisions by common law courts dealing with the legislative and executive confinement of “Islamic” asylum seekers, “enemy combatants” and “terrorism suspects,” and certain classes of criminal offenders in spaces beyond the doctrines, paradigms and institutions of the criminal law. The Article proposes an ontology and a poetics of judging equal to …

Gender, Race, And Intersectionality On The Federal Appellate Bench., Todd Collins, Laura Moyer

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

While theoretical justifications predict that a judge’s gender and race may influence judicial decisions, empirical support for these arguments has been mixed. However, recent increases in judicial diversity necessitate a reexamination of these earlier studies. Rather than examining individual judges on a single characteristic, such as gender or race alone, this research note argues that the intersection of individual characteristics may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the effects of diversity on the federal appellate bench. The results of cohort models examining the joint effects of race and gender suggest that minority female judges are more likely to support criminal …

Brennan V. Scalia, Justice Or Jurisprudence? A Moderate Proposal, Travis A. Knobbe

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

A New (And Better) Interpretation Of Holmes's Prediction Theory Of Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Holmes's famous 1897 theory that law is a prediction of what courts will do in fact slowly changed the way law schools taught law until, by the mid-1920s legal realism took over the curriculum. The legal realists argued that judges decide cases on all kinds of objective and subjective reasons including precedents. If law schools wanted to train future lawyers to be effective, they should be exposed to collateral subjects that might influence judges: law and society, law and literature, and so forth. But the standard interpretation has been a huge mistake. It treats law as analogous to weather forecasting: …

Friction By Design: The Necessary Contest Of State Judicial Power And Legislative Policymaking, Michael L. Buenger

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Judicial Nullification? Judicial Compliance And Non-Compliance With Jury Improvement Efforts, Paula Hannaford-Agor

Faculty Publications

The present article explores the formal and informal factors that contribute to variation in state and local jury trial practices, and especially judicial compliance with mandatory practices and prohibitions. Part II describes the State-of­ the-States Survey of Jury Improvement Efforts, its methodology, and its basic findings concerning the variation in use of different trial practices. Part III discusses how various formal and informal factors affect the judicial use of those practices. Because the practice of permitting jurors to submit written questions to witnesses has received greater attention, and generated greater debate and dissension in both case law and state and …

Romancing The Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the 20th century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through …

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: A Pragmatic Approach To Nonprecedential Opinions In The Federal Appellate Courts, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

For many years, judges and academics have debated the pros and cons of non-precedential judicial opinions in the federal appellate courts. Although the utility, necessity, and advisability of non-precedential opinions remain interesting issues to debate, at this point they are somewhat beside the point. Academics have lost the debate on non-precedential opinions. Judges control whether non-precedential opinions are permissible, and judges are not going to give them up anytime soon.

So, as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Rather than continue to debate the merits of non-precedential opinions, the better course of action is to find …

Only Skin Deep: The Cost Of Partisan Politics On Minority Diversity Of The Federal Bench: Why Care Whether Judges Look “Like America” If, Because Of Politics, A “Voice Of Color” Has Become A “Whisper Of Color”?, Sylvia R. Lazos

Scholarly Works

This article explores the difficulties encountered in diversifying the federal bench and why the partisanship of the confirmation process decreases the diversity of viewpoints on the bench. Presidents value diversity in nominating judges. While Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had very contrasting political styles and judicial philosophies, the judges appointed by these two presidents now account for almost 80% of the current active federal minority judges. There has been progress in the area of descriptive diversity; currently 18% of the active federal bench is made up of minority judges according to data compiled from the Judicial Center. However, there …

Working Class Judges, William D. Henderson, Christopher J. Zorn, Jason J. Czarnezki

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In recent years, a steady chorus of dignitaries has decried the low pay of federal judges and suggested that the federal judiciary is on the brink of losing its best and its brightest. The persistent nature of these claims should give us pause. Scott Baker's recent study empirically evaluates these claims by examining the relationship between judicial salaries and the work habits and voting patterns of federal appellate judges. If large pay disparities are indeed eroding the quality of the federal bench, Baker theorizes this likely results in more ideological voting, fewer dissents, longer delays in issuing opinions, and a …

Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

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 …

Locating Authority In Law, And Avoiding The Authoritarianism Of 'Textualism', Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

Much modern jurisprudence attempts to move the locus of authority away from people with authority in order to locate it instead, for example, in rules or texts. This article argues that authority, wherever it exists, is a quality of the actions of persons. The article mounts this argument by showing how Justice Scalia's textualism is the legal analogue of a largely discredited form of "Christian positivism," one that leads to a form of authoritarianism. The article goes on to argue that authorianism can be avoided only by individuals' and their communities' becoming authoritative, including in the making and enforcement of …

Judging Judges And Dispute Resolution Processes, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article critiques Professor Chris Guthrie's lead symposium article entitled, "Misjudging." Guthrie's article makes two major arguments. The first is a descriptive, empirical argument that judges are prone to error because of three types of "blinders" and that people underestimate the amount of such judicial error. The second argument is prescriptive, recommending that, because of these judicial blinders, disputants should consider using non-judicial dispute resolution processes generally, and particularly facilitative mediation and arbitration.This article critiques both arguments. It notes that, although Guthrie presents evidence that judges do make the kinds of errors that he describes, his article does not address …

On Misjudging And Its Implications For Criminal Defendants, Their Lawyers And The Criminal Justice System, Rodney J. Uphoff

Faculty Publications

Unquestionably, judges misjudge. Even the most arrogant of judges ultimately will concede that all judges err and, at some point, fail to apply governing law to the facts of the case accurately. Although all might agree that judges err, not all judges, lawyers, and scholars agree on how judges should behave or on what constitutes good judging. Not surprisingly, they also disagree about misjudging and the frequency with which it occurs.In his provocative article Misjudging, Chris Guthrie contends that “misjudging is more common, more systematic, and more harmful than the legal system has fully realized.” Based on my observations and …