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How much does attorney quality influence the outcome of cases in which one litigant is significantly more capable than the other? Using a unique dataset of all asylum merits decision from 1990 to 2010, we find that high quality representation evens the odds for asylum applicants and that not being represented by legal counsel is actually better than being represented by a poor lawyer. In this analysis, we draw on a modified party capability theory and create new measures of attorney capability. We find that variation in attorney capability is a primary driver of the disparity in asylum outcomes in U.S. immigration courts and that a likely causal mechanism for this influence is the judge‐specific reputation of an attorney.

In seeking to understand the variation in asylum grant rates by immigration judges (IJs), we apply a variation of the attitudinal model thatScholars of the asylum system in the United States have observed that there is a vast discrepancy of grant rates among individual immigration judges (IJs). To date, no one has advanced and tested a theory of why there is such dramatic variation in grant rates. In this article, we introduce and test a theory that incorporates insights from international relations and the judicial decision-making literature. Our major contribution to understanding the decision making of IJs within the U.S. asylum system is to provide a theory for explaining the widely divergent grant rates of IJs, and then to test that theory in a methodologically sophisticated manner. A secondary contribution of our article is to apply an explicitly cognitive model of judicial decision making to the behavior of IJs. We test these theories using U.S. asylum decisions made by IJs between 1997 and 2004. We find that the policy predispositions of the IJs play a dominant role in explaining the observed discrepancies in asylum grant rates and that liberal IJs respond to certainThe authors acknowledge the financial support of the Overbrook Foundation for portions of this project. The authors also wish to thank immigration attorney Paul Zoltan and the staff attorneys at HRI for their insights into the asylum process. The authors also wish to thank colleagues Tom Brunell and Clint Peinhardt for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript.

What roles do prior expertise and accumulated experience play in shaping ideologically consistent voting on a specialized court? Using a dataset of obviousness patent cases from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spanning 1997–2007, we show that prior expertise enhances the influence of ideology on judicial decisionmaking, but that accumulated experience does not. In addition, we build on previous work and show that ideology is a factor in decisionmaking in technical areas of law, contrary to the received wisdom on patent cases.

What role does judicial subject matter expertise play in the review of agency decisions? Using a data set of decisions in which the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) is reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, we investigate this question and find that greater subject matter expertise does make it more likely that a judge will vote to reverse an agency decision.