Judges sitting on three-judge panels in the U.S. Courts of Appeals make decisions under the shadow of potential review by supervising courts, the full circuit sitting en banc and the Supreme Court. Review is more likely for published decisions, particularly when a dissent is present. Unpublished decisions do not have binding precedential status. These factors create the potential for judges to be strategic in deciding whether to publish a decision or write a dissent. We develop a formal model of decision aggregation that takes the possibility of negotiating a tradeoff between the ideological location of a rule and its precedential value into account. Implications of our model are tested empirically using an original data set of search and seizure cases. Our model and results indicate that preferences within the panel and judicial hierarchy coupled with discretionary review influence judges’ decisions regarding publication and dissent, and that these choices have important consequences.

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Prominent explanations for appellate review prioritize the ideological alignment of the lower and reviewing courts. We suggest that interpersonal relationships play an important role. The effect of an appellate judge's ideology on her decision to reverse depends on the level of interpersonal contact between the trial and appellate judge due to information provided by social and professional interactions. Relying on a dataset of all published Fourth Amendment search and seizure decisions from 1953-2010, we find that interpersonal relationships can dampen the effect of ideology in appellate review. When an appellate and trial court judge have frequent contact, the effect of ideology on the appellate judge's decision to reverse is essentially imperceptible. These findings speak to the importance of relationships in principal-agent arrangements generally and have implications for the structure of the federal judiciary and our understanding of the limits of ideological judicial decisionmaking.

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Despite an inherent kinship, the studies of political science and law spent many decades isolated from one another. In recent years the two fields have become more and more integrated, with an increasing number of political scientists collaborating with law professors and joining law school faculties. Political science is a rigorous discipline that can benefit both legal scholars and lawyers. Public Law-the subfield of political science that studies law and courts-has much to offer in understanding how judges make decisions and how larger political and institutional contexts affect the legal system. Furthermore, law students can only benefit from exposure to the methodological approaches that are standard in political science. Enhanced integration of political science and law will inherently expand the knowledge and reach of lawyers and legal scholars due to the important contributions discussed in this article.